Traditional compliance change processes are quietly becoming a business risk. Many financial institutions say they spend up to 70% of their compliance time monitoring, assessing, processing and operationalising the constant stream of regulatory updates.
According to AscentAI, in some cases, it can take as long as eight weeks to move a single change through the lifecycle, from initial review through to implementation across policies and controls.
That timeline matters because regulatory expectations do not pause while teams work through backlogs. When change takes weeks to process, firms can be left operating with out-of-date interpretations, inconsistent internal guidance, and controls that lag behind the latest requirements. The result is a widening gap between what regulators expect and what an organisation can evidence during audits or supervisory engagement.
At the heart of the problem is an end-to-end workflow that is still overly manual. Teams must review new and amended regulations, isolate what is relevant, pinpoint the specific obligations that apply, assess how each obligation impacts business units, and then ensure those requirements filter down into GRC policies and controls. That is a heavy lift even in stable environments, but it becomes a recurring operational strain when updates arrive continually.
A more resilient approach starts with treating the regulatory lifecycle as three connected phases that can be streamlined with technology. The goal is not simply speed, but accuracy, auditability and consistency—so that compliance decisions are traceable and changes are implemented uniformly across the business.
The first phase is horizon scanning: taming the tidal wave of regulatory information. Regulators do not just publish rule updates; they also signal priorities through guidance, speeches, news and supervisory communications. This material can be vital for preparing for audits or anticipating shifts in enforcement focus, but it is also where teams can lose time chasing noise.
Automated horizon scanning tools are designed to address this by continually scanning relevant regulators and surfacing only what is applicable to your organisation. Done well, these tools capture, aggregate and filter information around defined needs, then distribute it to the right stakeholders—helping teams avoid irrelevant updates while reducing the risk of missing critical developments.
The second phase is obligation and regulatory change management, where the real resource drain often sits. When updated regulations land, organisations must ingest the text, determine applicability, identify new or amended obligations within thousands of words, assess impacts, and then cascade changes into internal frameworks. With final rules adding up to tens of thousands of pages each year, manual review becomes slow, expensive and error-prone.
AI-driven automation is increasingly positioned as the alternative, enabling teams to review rule text at scale, summarise updates, compare old versus new language, extract obligations tied to business relevance, and push structured outputs downstream into compliance systems. This is less about replacing judgement and more about reducing the operational burden, so experts can focus on decisions rather than document handling.
The third phase is integration with GRC. When change management automation feeds directly into GRC workflows, the analysis and enrichment completed upstream can automatically update policies and controls. Over time, the GRC environment becomes a continually refreshed source of truth for compliance, supporting enterprise-wide consistency and clearer command-and-control across the regulatory lifecycle.
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