Introducing the Impact Team Gulf Podcast

The Regtech Arms Race  - Is AI widening or bridging the gap between Innovation and Oversight?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Impact Team Golf Podcast. I'm Mark Rothwell Brooks. Thank you for subscribing to the podcast. We'll be discussing a variety of topics on the feed, what's happening with digital and AI transformation in banking and government in the region. We'll have some great guests also on the feed. So it's great to have you join us and I hope you enjoy. Reviewing reports, submissions, and audits to ensure that banks are compliant. But the pace of innovation, especially with AI, is changing that equation. Commercial banks are adopting AI for credit decisions, compliance monitoring, even customer service. It's everywhere. But regulators are still relying on PDF reports and quarterly submissions. And there's a real tension here. And the tension is that innovation is outpacing oversight. So the real question is: can AI actually help the regulator to catch up? Or does it just widen the gap? So let's start there. Historically, regulators have been playing catch-up. Every wave of financial innovation, from derivatives to crypto, has created a lag before supervision catches up. But AI could flip that dynamic, and for the first time, the regulators could have a tool that lets them see in real time what's happening inside the banks they oversee. So imagine if instead of waiting for a report, they could see a live dashboard of compliance performance or capital adequacy. It's almost like supervision as a service, where AI continuously monitors the system and flags anomalies as and when they happen in real time. Now that is a complete paradigm shift. It's predictive rather than reactive. And that's the promise, but it's also the challenge. So over the next few episodes, I'm going to be joined by leaders in this space, and we'll be discussing some of the opportunities that AI brings to the regulatory landscape and what is currently happening in this reg tech arms race that's going on around the globe. So I look forward to the next time.