Abu Dhabi's FSRA launches initiative to help firms develop AI solutions for compliance

The Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of Abu Dhabi Global Market has launched an initiative that will help firms operating in the region to come up with their own Artificial Intelligence-based solutions for regulatory compliance.

The Open Regulation (OpenReg) initiative, as it's called, provides a “training ground” where industry specialists, RegTech companies and the data science community have access to FSRA’s AI models, data and research.

What is the OpenReg initiative?

OpenReg lays out the regulatory context required by firms to develop their own AI solutions. Building on the foundation of FSRA’s previous project Digital Regulation, it provides interested stakeholders the ability to engage with FSRA directly.

This initiative is hosted in the ADGM GitHub repository.

The FSRA and the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) are working together to leverage OpenReg and the university’s AI expertise to accelerate the adoption of AI in financial regulation. 

Without this initiative, automating regulatory compliance was difficult as it's highly cognitive and contextual. Inadequate information or misinterpretation of a rule could result in inappropriate business decisions, improper risk management and control, or possible regulatory breaches. 

As a result, several firms were finding it difficult to deploy AI in regulatory compliance and instead turn to in-house or outsourced specialists who manually carry out these processes, says the statement.

"This is the first time a regulator has tried to provide regulatory context in the form of machine-readable regulations and AI models," said Emmanuel Givanakis, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the ADGM FSRA.