Unified compliance timeline

Unified compliance logging

There’s more startups in reg tech / compliance trying to solve very niche problems than ever before. Some of it is definitely due to advances in AI but more so because traditional GRC systems might tell you that you need to do something but they lack the data sources and the engine to process this data to automate the doing. Most of the work ends up happening outside of these systems and leads to a path of connecting a number of operational point solutions with disparate data structures that rarely talk to each other or don’t allow for easy data access. Compliance teams then resolve to manual processes of pulling data out and working in spreadsheets to analyze it. Not ideal.

What is needed from compliance

So what do banks and fintechs need from compliance? Most of our conversations are now leading to the same conclusion – what banks now look for is comprehensive lifecycle visibility across every end-user touchpoint that has compliance meaning. Essentially a timeline of every compliance event that is then handed off to automated processes for analysis, reporting and insights.

At the same time, fintechs want and are eager to adopt a more automated and intuitive approach to compliance that scales with their growth and doesn’t impede on their product iterations. While on the surface these forces oppose each other, they're actually pushing towards the same fundamental compliance architecture - a complete log of end-user interactions that is then run through a compliance filter and analysis engine for alerting and reporting. In essence, this architecture functions as a regulatory intelligence system that ingests data from diverse operational sources and performs continuous compliance state assessment against established regulatory parameters.

However, neither traditional GRC systems nor new point solutions or AI are really equipped to handle this currently. Typically, compliance tools are organized around regulations or functional areas. It’s never focused on the product that is being offered therefore failing to capture the actual customer journey. Compliance teams often get a dashboard or a scorecard, but they really need this living timeline that's useful for both population-level analysis/reporting and individual investigations. This approach fundamentally shifts how team implement compliance oversight:

• It captures the sequential flow of customer interactions where compliance risks actually materialize
• It provides context that isolated compliance checks miss entirely
• It enables both granular investigation and holistic risk assessment using the same underlying data structure

Just think how a typical loan origination compliance review works today: disparate systems track application data, disclosures, verification, and decision logic (e.g. LoanPro, Archer, Socure, GDS Link, etc.). Compliance teams struggle to reconstruct the exact sequence of events when issues arise. A timeline-based approach would make this reconstruction immediate and comprehensive.

What are the challenges today?

Building this timeline-based compliance system is extraordinarily difficult for several reasons:

• No organization has a complete, centralized log of customer interactions that can be easily filtered for compliance purposes
• Events exist in different systems with inconsistent data structures and ontologies
• Legacy processes still rely on manual documentation that exist outside digital systems
• Extracting relevant compliance facts from operational data requires sophisticated interpretation

Traditional GRC platforms were built for a different era of compliance management where documentation and attestation took precedence over data-driven oversight. Meanwhile, new point solutions often tackle narrow compliance challenges without addressing the fundamental architecture needed for comprehensive visibility – setting up the ontology to do that is also tricky with limited resources and shorter term priorities.

The architecture requirements

To enable this timeline-based approach, we need a compliance architecture with three critical components:

• A unified customer interaction log that chronologically records every compliance-relevant event across channels and systems
• A robust data ingestion layer that automatically captures and extracts compliance facts from existing operational systems
• A compliance rules engine that continuously evaluates this event stream against regulatory requirements to identify potential issues

Given opportunity though, this data capture and analysis provides some serious benefits including:

• Significantly reduced time to market for new products and features where comprehensive visibility into compliance implications and identification of risks enables faster validation and approval
• Reduced manual oversight through automated monitoring replacing labor-intensive sampling and testing
• Improved regulatory relationships by demonstrating comprehensive oversight
• Early risk identification and reduced impact due to real time risk monitoring

As a result we are seeing 60-70% reduction in regulatory exam and audit prep. Pulling up data and answering questions in real time also builds a lot of confidence with the regulators.

Path to implementation

Building this capability requires a pragmatic, phased approach:

1. Start with a single compliance domain (e.g., new customer onboarding, CIP requirements, regulatory disclosure requirements)
2. Develop the data ingestion pipeline for relevant customer interaction points and decide where your log lives
3. Create the compliance rules that evaluate these interactions
4. Expand incrementally to adjacent compliance areas

The most successful implementations focus on delivering immediate value through targeted compliance use cases while building toward the comprehensive architecture.

Our digital journeys are now riddled with embedded financial products, which makes the timeline-based approach to compliance not just advantageous but essential. Regulators are already shifting toward data-intensive examination approaches that assume institutions have comprehensive visibility into their compliance operations. The future of compliance isn't about doing more with less—it's about seeing more, understanding more, and leveraging that insight to deliver better financial products faster and with less compliance risk. This data-driven architecture will make that possible.