New research from AscentAI’s 2026 RegTech Benchmark Survey has put regulatory monitoring firmly in the spotlight — and the findings make uncomfortable reading for risk and compliance leaders.
According to AscentAI, when asked to identify the five most difficult elements of their regulatory change management processes, professionals across regional banks, investment banks and broker-dealer firms placed monitoring regulatory updates at the very top of the list.
AscentAI recently discussed a key question within RegTech, which is whether monitoring is the regulatory blind spot of firms.
For APAC respondents, the challenge was even more acute: monitoring regulators was cited as the single hardest element across the entire change management lifecycle.
The findings point to a structural problem that many in the industry have long suspected but rarely quantified. Despite years of investment in compliance infrastructure, firms are still struggling to keep pace with the sheer complexity of the regulatory environment they operate in.
Why monitoring continues to be so difficult
Three interconnected challenges lie at the heart of the problem. The first is volume. Thousands of regulators spanning dozens of jurisdictions issue updates on overlapping timelines, creating a near-constant deluge of content that can easily overwhelm already stretched teams. The second is relevance. Not every update applies to every organisation, and without sophisticated filtering, important changes risk being buried beneath noise that has no bearing on a firm’s specific obligations. The third is connectivity — even when a relevant change is identified, linking it to the obligations it affects and the downstream actions it should trigger remains a persistent gap.
Manual monitoring processes compound all three of these problems. Search tools and email subscriptions may capture some regulatory movements, but they rarely remove irrelevant content effectively, and almost never connect a change to the compliance actions it demands.
What effective, continuous monitoring looks like
Advanced horizon scanning tools are increasingly recognised as the foundation for modern regulatory change management. Functioning as the first link in what should be a largely automated chain, these tools provide continuous monitoring of global regulatory sources, automated daily alerts on relevant updates and rule changes, and intelligent filtering that delivers information tailored to an organisation’s specific needs. The best platforms also offer intelligent linking of related content to provide a comprehensive perspective, workflow tools and templates for task management, and built-in audit trails to support accountability.
Transitioning to a continuous compliance monitoring model requires firms to get four things right: monitoring every relevant source on an ongoing basis; automatically capturing updates and aggregating them into a single, business-specific source of truth; filtering intelligently so only pertinent updates reach the right stakeholders; and linking captured content directly to obligations and downstream change management workflows.
When all four elements are in place, the compliance function shifts from reactive firefighting to proactive risk management — ensuring the right people have the right information at the right time, with no regulatory change falling through the cracks.
Read the full AscentAI post here.
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