How AscentAI is powering the next generation of regulatory compliance automation
Founded in 2015, AscentAI was originally created by regulatory compliance experts and practitioners who saw the pace and scale of regulatory evolution and complexity multiplying, and believed that traditional manual processes were unsustainable in an age of digital evolution.
Chris Junker, CEO of AscentAI, heralded the firm’s creation as part of the ‘there has to be a better way’ story. The founders of the company, he claims, recognised that automating regulatory change management using AI could provide businesses with a quantum leap in capabilities that saved them money, made their teams more productive and helped them mitigate risk more effectively.
He said, “A critical decision in those early days was to start with a simple, but very powerful question: “what is the best way to conduct a regulatory change management process?” The team leveraged their experience and expertise as risk and compliance professionals to create a proper blueprint first, and then apply AI capabilities to specific parts of the process to automate it.”
Through this approach, the company determined that the regulatory obligation is the core data element required to do change management properly.
“Our AscentFocus solution is purpose-built to extract granular obligations from regulatory text into data objects, versioned over time, which can then be used to automatically assess applicability to a specific customer’s business, be analyzed to provide summaries and side by side highlighted changes, and supercharge GRCs,” said Junker.
“AscentAI is the only vendor in the marketplace that powers change management using granular obligation data objects, because that’s the best way to do it”, the AscentAI CEO outlined.
Rebrand and USP
The company recently underwent a significant rebrand, changing from Ascent Technologies to AscentAI, driven, according to Junker, by a desire to more accurate reflect its’ mission.
“AI is, quite simply, foundational to our approach to regulatory compliance automation. There’s a lot of hype around AI as a “magic bullet”, but our approach to and use of AI is pragmatic – we use specific AI elements to automate rock-solid business processes. No gimmicks, no magic tricks, and for our customers, no more spreadsheets,” he said.
Junker noted that whilst AI powers its solutions, the firm constantly monitors the quality of its regulatory content using its regulatory intelligence team of lawyers and compliance professionals, who ensure everything the firm delivers to its customers is accurate and up to date. He noted that data quality and accuracy is critical success factor for customers; they can be confident that the data that AscentAI provides.
In a sector that is leveraging AI at such a critical mass level, being able to set yourself apart from competitors in such an industry can be tough, but the benefit for those who can meet an important need better than others can be huge.
Junker remarked that the regulatory intelligence solutions marketplace is highly competitive, and with that comes a lot of hype – particularly when it comes to regulatory change management automation.
AscentAI provides two solutions, Ascent Horizon, focused on horizon scanning, and AscentFocus, an obligation and regulatory change management offering, that supports businesses in controlling their enterprise regulatory lifecycle.
Junker added, “AscentHorizon delivers strategic information like news, guidance, enforcement actions, and consultation papers, that enable firms to keep their finger on the pulse of the landscape. It equips teams – risk, compliance, legal – with the latest information they need to understand the road ahead and proactively manage their priorities to ensure the enterprise is prepared for what’s next.”
Additionally, Junker emphasised that AscentFocus is the only solution in the marketplace that extracts obligations from regulatory text and creates versioned data objects.
‘Now, we realize that may sound a little “techy”… or prompt a question of “so, what?” The singular importance of that capability cannot be understated; because obligations are the building blocks of regulatory compliance. By extracting obligations and creating data objects, AscentAI is able to fully automate the entire regulatory change management process,” he stated.
Other vendors here may simply repurpose their document-based horizon scanning engines for change management, said Junker. Whilst they can tell their customers something has changed, they still require teams to manually extract the obligations embedded in the text and assess everything for applicability and impact.
“Teams using manual processes or other tools must start from scratch every time (every document is “new”), spending countless hours slogging through extraneous material to find the actionable information they need. AscentFocus does all the heavy lifting automatically, providing customers with fully processed and enriched information that’s ready for action. Teams know everything they need to know, and can act swiftly—with confidence, efficiency, and scale,” finished Junker.
How it works
How does the regulatory change management solution work? Here, Junker states that it starts with monitoring and capturing information directly from regulators.
He said, “Our AI pipelines process every line and every word of regulatory text, automatically extracting obligations (requirements) and parsing them into an individual data object that are stored in our regulatory library, which currently contains over 400,000 obligations globally. Within each obligation, we provide users with the ability to see underlying regulations and related obligations located in other areas of regulatory text for a full perspective.”
Once the regulatory obligations have been extracted and processed, AscentFocus automatically assesses applicability of the updated obligations to each customer’s specific inventory of obligations, which is defined collaboratively during AscentAI’s onboarding process.
Junker said, “This is a massive time saver, as customers no longer have to read documents or assess changes – it’s all done automatically for them. In addition, each of these updated obligations is processed and enriched by AscentFocus with summaries and side by side redlines highlighting every text change between the “old” version and the “new” version.”
According to Junker, teams use these capabilities to quickly understand what has happened, make informed decisions on what they need to do, and take action.
“We’ve spoken to dozens of firms who say they spend 70% of their time processing changes and determining applicability to their business. With AscentFocus, they don’t have to live like that anymore. Teams simply log in and are presented with a list of updated obligations specifically tailored to their business that need to be addressed,” said Junker.
A question that can be asked here, however, is that a lot of vendors can claim to solve for that. On this, Junker stresses a significant caveat.
He said, “They do; however in reality, there’s a lot of over-promising and under-delivering. Why? Because they’re tech isn’t designed to extract granular obligations, create versioned data objects, and use them to fully automate change management processes like AscentAI can.
For Junker, many of these other technologies are based on a horizon scanning engine that relies on documents that still require manual reviews and assessments rather than explicit and specific obligations that apply to their business.
He said, “Because of that, automating regulatory change applicability and impact – the most arduous part of the regulatory change management process – is virtually impossible. Furthermore, these other solutions treat updates as “new” information every time rather than an update to existing obligations like AscentFocus delivers. This puts an enormous strain on teams, who are overserved with extraneous information and must spend precious hours figuring out what to do next. “
The benefits of AscentAI
One of the most important aspects for any firm to be able to stand out amongst its competition is whether the approach is leverages can be more successful. For AscentAI, does its approach have downstream benefits?
Here, Junker states that its approach to regulatory change management powered by obligations has ‘enormous’ downstream benefits. While some of its customers use AscentFocus as a standalone change management solution, Junker stressed that a substantial number of them integrate its solution with their GRC.
He added, “We work with leading GRC vendors including IBM OpenPages, LogicGate, CoreStream, Resolver, MCO, Onspring, and Diligent, injecting our enriched obligation data objects into their platforms to ensure their GRC obligations (requirements) are always up to date, along with change summaries and side by side highlighted updates to enable teams to operate their change management processes natively in the GRC. Simply put, AscentAI data supercharges customer GRCs.”
Furthermore, when an AscentAI obligation is updated in the GRC, alerts can then be triggered for all of the downstream policies and controls connected to that obligation that can be impacted by the change.
Junker said, “This capability provides firms with true end-to-end traceability and command of the entire lifecycle, from the time a regulator finalizes a regulatory change down to a specific Control governing daily business operations. In addition, with our built-in audit log and reporting capabilities, customers are able to catalog every change and decision made in the process, providing defensible proof of compliance during an exam.”
When a new customer starts using AscentAI, how do such clients see the benefits and savings?
For Junker, customers start to see benefits from day one, due to the fact they now would have an enterprise-grade solution that supports them in monitoring, capturing, assessing and operationalising all aspects of the regulatory lifecycle automatically.
He said, “With AscentHorizon, they have all of the latest strategic information from their regulators at their fingertips, along with collaboration and productivity tools to understand, prioritize, share, and address strategic regulatory evolution that impacts their business. And with AscentFocus, they can quickly, accurately, and confidently identify regulatory changes at a granular, obligation level and take the necessary steps to mitigate risk and ensure compliance.”
“In essence, no more manual processes and no more spreadsheets! They’re saving time, getting more things done, and are able to focus on higher-value tasks day to day,” said Junker.
The customer journey
For Junker, something of key importance is to recognise that AscentAI is more than just a tech vendor.
“Our Regulatory Intelligence and Customer Success Teams are lawyers, compliance professionals, and product experts who roll up their sleeves and work side by side with customers during the onboarding process to identify compliance gaps (pure risk), build robust obligation inventories, and tune our systems to the specific needs of our customers. As every risk and compliance professional knows, the details matter…a lot.”
With the company having onboarded hundreds of customers over the last decade, its teams provide expert guidance and best practices for every customer, claims the AscentAI CEO.
He detailed, “We enable them to build a high confidence regulatory understanding and tune their technology to ensure every update is captured and can be operationalized effectively. And, because the regulatory landscape is highly dynamic, our Teams collaborate with customers on an ongoing basis as new regulatory requirements are implemented and their businesses evolve.”
Future plans
What does the future look like for AscentAI? For Junker, the next couple of years will prove to be an exciting period for the marketplace and the company at large.
He said, “There is a great desire by financial services firms of all sizes to digitally transform their risk and compliance operations to work better, faster, and smarter. The hype around AI as a magic bullet seen over the last few years has matured into a more pragmatic approach to leverage AI-powered automation across the enterprise. Firms see the value of AI and automation overall, but are being very deliberate on where and how they apply it to their internal operations and working with vendors to build their risk and compliance tech stack.”
Junker added that this approach meshes well with AscentAI’s solutions and capabilities, which are based on optimal business processes.
He went on, “We’re having conversations with large global tier 1 firms looking to automate at scale and be more agile as well as smaller firms seeking automation to address unsustainable manual-based processes that require more headcount alike.
“Within AscentAI, we’re continuously innovating on our solutions, implementing features like our new workflows in AscentFocus to make regulatory change management easier and more collaborative, agentic AI capabilities to automate mundane tasks and highlight important evolutionary details, and new capabilities to help firms assess and monitor risk. In addition, we’re actively engaging our users via our customer advisory program to guide and inform our innovation strategy to ensure our solutions deliver on the real-world needs and expectations of our customers.”
Junker concluded by saying that the company is also collaborating with more technology partners including GRCs and FinTechs to integrate its regulatory data seamlessly into its platforms.
“These integrations unlock new risk and compliance capabilities and insights that empower financial institutions to operate with confidence and speed,” Junker remarked.
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