AWARDS CATEGORIES
Category A: Best Solutions
Within this category, our judging panel will look at five broad areas in which financial institutions leverage technology solutions to meet regulatory demands and stay compliant: Institutional Resilience and Integrity; Fraud & Financial Crime; Markets and Infrastructure; Virtual Assets; and ESG & Sustainability.
Solutions will be assessed on criteria such as flexibility, robustness, scalability, customisability, transparency, support, cost, and return on investment for end clients.
Depending on the number and diversity of submissions received, subcategories may be created to ensure submissions can be evaluated fairly based on the specific regulatory requirements being addressed.
A1: Institutional Resilience and Integrity
This category will recognise solutions for financial risk modelling, forecasting and stress-testing that help banks to ensure capital and liquidity are adequate to meet regulatory and operational requirements. Given the heavy data and processing needs typically required for these processes, the judges will consider whether the solution helps banks manage large datasets and increase the number and variety of scenarios that can be modelled.
This category will recognise solutions that help financial institutions assess and manage current and future credit risk exposures. The judging panel will be particularly interested in solutions that can ingest alternative data, allow model customisation, and provide porfolio monitoring and early warning features - so that lenders can more proactively manage the full spectrum of credit risk in the current economic environment.
This category will recognise technology solutions and services that enable financial institutions to remain compliant with regulatory reporting obligations. Our judging panel will look at robustness, adaptability, transparency, and flexibility, as well as the solution’s ability to integrate source data from disparate systems, reconcile and validate the data, and generate reports. Solutions that cater to different types of reporting (e.g. tax reporting, trade reporting, AML, etc.) will be considered separately.
This category will recognise platforms, solutions and services that help financial institutions monitor for changes in regulatory requirements, assist them in making change decisions, and facilitate organisational planning around required changes. Our judging panel will be interested in workflow management tools that help firms manage their end-to-end compliance processes efficiently and effectively and reduce legal and regulatory risk.
This category will recognise solutions that can use advanced datasets, analytics and innovative approaches in the detection and management of conduct risk within financial institutions. The judges will look for tools that use behavioural indicators and metrics to help identify sources of misconduct risk, inform decision-making, measure performance and track progress over time.
A2: Fraud & Financial Crime
This category will recognise solutions that reliably ensure a speedy, frictionless and efficient customer onboarding process without sacrificing on KYC and AML/CFT compliance obligations. Such solutions should incorporate screening and risk scoring components to ensure new customers that present higher risk can be detected quickly and easily. Our judging panel will pay regard to solutions that enhance regulatory compliance, operational efficiency, time to revenue and client experience.
This category will recognise solutions that can reliably help financial institutions apply risk-based assessments to onboarding corporate customers, particularly when uncertainties exist around ownership structures, beneficial ownership and possible links between entities. The judging panel will look for solutions that facilitate due diligence, help identify bad actors, ensure compliance and effectively manage risk.
This category will recognise services and solutions that enable effective due diligence of supply chains and third parties, help financial institutions to identify red flags, and enable quality investigations. Solutions should include due diligence reports and have protections in place to safeguard sensitive information. Due diligence reports should take into account corporate structures, beneficial ownership, sanctions and PEPs lists, adverse media, and anti-bribery and corruption risks - among other factors.
This category will recognise solutions which can help financial institutions assess customer risk throughout the entire client journey, from onboarding and account opening to customer monitoring and regular reviews of KYC data. Solutions should be able to provide a complete view of customer information across business lines and help organisations centralise client relationship management and communications, while also streamlining compliance-related workflows and document management processes.
This category will recognise technology solutions which leverage advanced analytics, artificial intelligence or machine learning to automate AML/CFT compliance processes, enhance effectiveness, reduce false positives and identify "true positives". Our judging panel will look for analytics solutions that can enrich the KYC process, enhance sanctions screening performance, optimise transaction monitoring, reduce false positives, or help to uncover links between individual and/or corporate customers, among other use cases.
This category will recognise solutions that help financial institutions assess the risk of trade transactions they execute and finance. Solutions should account for the nature of the goods or services, the parties and entities involved in the transaction, including vessels, cities and ports. The judging panel will consider specialised tools for due diligence, document checking, and automation that help to guard against TBML, sanctions evasion, and circumvention of trade controls.
This category will recognise solutions that help financial institutions screen customers against lists of sanctioned individuals and entities, politically exposed persons, and other lists maintained by law enforcement and other authorities. The judging panel will look for solutions that allow batch screening, configuration flexibility, and fuzzy matching capabilities to minimise the risk of true hits being omitted.
This category will recognise solutions that help financial institutions to identify and halt potentially fraudulent account activity. The judging panel will look for solutions that leverage advanced authentication and identity verification tools, real-time transaction scoring, decisioning, alert management, and monitoring of user behaviour, devices and account activity to detect anomalies and prevent fraud losses in real-time.
This category will recognise services and solutions that help financial institutions to bolster their cyber resilience through the implementation of advanced security measures and monitoring capabilities, or help to reduce the risk of a cyber incident impairing a firm's ability to operate. The judging panel will also consider tools that are designed to help firms protect their data - including customer and employee data, sensitive financial information, and trade secrets.
This category will recognise solutions that enable firms to manage tax reporting obligations across jurisdictions in an efficient and compliant manner. The judging panel will be looking for solutions that are able to ingest the required data, compile reports, and perform integrity checks to ensure the accuracy of reports.
A3: Markets and Infrastructure
This category will recognise solutions that can perform monitoring of trading and market activities and use analytics and/or AI/machine learning to detect suspicious patterns, market abuse and misconduct risk in a variety of asset classes. The judging panel will also consider solutions that offer capabilities in market, trade, communications surveillance, as well as conflicts of interests and personal account dealing management.
This category will recognise services and solutions that help firms prepare for compliance with phase 6 of UMR (Uncleared Margin Rules). Given the type of firms coming into scope in phase 6, the judging panel will be most interested in solutions that provide cost, efficiency and automation benefits in areas such as contract repapering, custodial agreements negotiation, collateral optimisation, margin calculation.
This category will recognise data solutions that help financial institutions to obtain accurate and complete information about financial instruments and their issuers, including security identifiers, terms and conditions, corporate actions, entity linkages and ownership data, identification information and other datasets. The judging panel will look for providers whose datasets comprehensively cover global markets and asset classes.
This category will recognise solutions which facilitate compliance with disclosure obligations relating to major shareholdings, short selling and position reporting. The judging panel will be looking for solutions that provide threshold monitoring, workflow automation, and automated report generation, while also allowing flexibility for aggregation and disaggregation of holdings for reporting by different group structures.
This category will recognise solutions which help financial institutions with pre- and post-trade reporting and data reconciliation across asset classes and jurisdictions. The judges will look for solutions which can help to enrich a firm’s in-house data to meet completeness, accuracy and timeliness standards required by regulators, while offering certainty on trade reporting workflows, including to address post-reporting error clean-up and reconciliation.
This category will recognise solutions that help financial institutions to maximise automation of operations related to corporate actions. Solutions should provide financial institutions proactive controls which can ensure that all relevant updates are captured, formatted and delivered to the relevant stakeholders in a timely manner. The judges will look for solutions which reduce risk of failure, improve operational efficiency and enhance client services.
A4: Virtual Assets
This category will recognise solutions that can use information from various blockchain ledgers and advanced analytics to identify, inspect, and track transactional data to understand the underlying activities and assign risk scores to customers and their transactions. The judging panel will look for solutions that can help to identify sources of funds, money flow history, and potential links to illicit actors and crypto-related crime - for use by crypto exchanges, financial institutions, regulators and law enforcement.
This category will recognise solutions that can help to efficiently and reliably evaluate crypto transactions for fraudulent or suspicious activity. The judging panel will look for solutions that can integrate customer profiles into transaction monitoring, reduce manual workflows, leverage blockchain intelligence, identify links to sanctioned entities, and provide real-time alerts when suspicious transactions are detected.
This category will recognise solutions that can conduct real-time surveillance and monitor trading behaviour and patterns for common abusive practices in crypto markets, such as manipulation, spoofing, quote stuffing, insider trading and wash trading. The judging panel will be looking for solutions that are able to capture all crypto trading data flowing through the order book and use analytics to generate alerts when specific criteria are breached.
This category will recognise solutions that help crypto exchanges, wallet providers, and financial institutions that deal in crypto assets to comply with the travel rule. The judging panel will look for solutions that help to automate counterparty due dilligence and verification, perform data transfers regardless of protocol, enable secure storage of customer information, and generate travel rule reports - at scale.
This category will recognise crypto custody and asset-servicing solutions with bank grade security architecture and standards along with advanced legal and compliance controls. The judging panel will be looking for solutions that can be used by regulated entities and can withstand attempts of theft and other malicious activity, while also minimising regulatory risk and offering flexibility, self-management features, and customisation.
This category will recognise services and solutions that can help businesses, individuals, regulators and law enforcement with blockchain forensics, investigations and asset recovery in the event of fraud, theft, scam or other form of crypto-related crime. The judging panel will consider services and solutions that can identify responsible parties, trace funds, recover what has been stolen, and help to remediate vulnerabilities.
This category will recognise virtual asset service providers - i.e. crypto exchanges, trading platforms, wallet custodians, etc. - that demonstrate industry leadership and a commitment to creating a safer marketplace, enhancing industry practices and complying with regulatory requirements. The judging panel will look for VASPs tend to go beyond bare-minimum regulatory requirements, prioritising customer protection, good market conduct, and sound risk management practices.
A5: ESG & Sustainability
This category will recognise data providers that specialise in collecting, aggregating and disseminating ESG information disclosed by companies through CSR or sustainability reports, annual reports, websites, and other public sources, as well as through direct contact with companies or by performing research, evaluations, and other analysis when the required data is not available. The judging panel will look for providers with rigorous quality control and verification of data, and those that cover a comprehensive array of companies.
This category will recognise providers that assign ESG scores and ratings to companies based on verified ESG data to help identify ESG related risks at an entity or transaction specific level. The judging panel will look for providers whose ESG scores and ratings are calculated using a transparent methodology and metrics, and can help to enhance credit assessment workflows, make investment decisions, and meet regulatory requirements.
This category will recognise solutions that help firms to identify and evaluate climate risks and enable them to integrate this in risk management, capital decisions and long-term strategic planning. The judging panel will be interested in solutions that can perform macro level analytics, portfolio evaluations, scenario analysis, quantitative modelling and stress testing.
This category will recognise solutions that facilitate compliance with ESG and climate-related disclosure and reporting requirements. The judging panel will consider solutions such as those that help firms aggregate the data required for disclosure or reporting purposes, calculate Scope 3 emissions, or generate TCFD-compliant and other types of templated reports.
This category will recognise consulting firms that specialise in and are assisting financial institutions to manage regulatory issues related to ESG matters. The judging panel will consider firms that are helping to address data-related challenges, establish quality controls, enhance workflows and risk management, or facilitate compliance with ESG and climate-related disclosure and reporting requirements.
This category will recognise initiatives that aim to overcome ESG-related challenges or meet ESG-related objectives, The judging panel will consider how innovative approaches and technologies were used, the extent of international and local market collaboration involved, and how the initiative served to address common industry challenges related to ESG-related requirements or expectations.
Category B: Outstanding Projects
Within this category, our judging panel will look at specific project implementations and collaborative initiatives that apply innovative techniques, tools or technology solutions to address regulatory requirements and deliver value in ways that set them apart from other industry approaches. Firms of any type or size can submit projects completed in the Asia Pacific region within the past 12-18 months.
The judges will consider the scope and complexity of the regulatory requirements or expectations being met, how the projects and initiatives achieve process efficiency and cost-effectiveness benefits, and the overall results of such projects/initiatives.
This category will recognise projects and initiatives undertaken by a public-private partnership involving collaboration between regulators, law enforcement, financial institutions or other stakeholders to address wider industry challenges. The judging panel will consider collaborative work done to combat financial crime, recover stolen assets, develop technology platforms or solutions for industry use, or other notable efforts.
This category will recognise projects and initiatives undertaken by an APAC regulator that leverages innovative approaches to dealing with long-standing industry challenges, and make it easier for financial industry participants to comply with regulatory requirements. The judging panel will look for projects that promise to significantly lower the regulatory burden for stakeholders, have broad application for a wide segment of the financiial industry, and can show clear adoption and success in achieving their objectives.
This category will recognise collaborative initiatives that feature participation from regulators, industry bodies, financial industry participants and other stakeholders, and have a common objective of addressing a regulatory or compliance challenge. Our judging panel will consider initiatives that involve the collaborative development of new technology, industry platforms, common practices or standards, and other collaborative projects that provide broad industry benefits.
This category will recognise RegTech initiatives that stand out as being particularly unique or innovative in their approach to dealing with a regulatory or compliance challenge. The judging panel will consider technology implementations and initiatives that significantly lower the regulatory burden for financial industry participants, the outcomes achieved from such initiatives, and their ability to demonstrate success.
This category will recognise projects at individual financial institutions that may have been particularly wide in scope or complexity, but where implementation was achieved with measurable outcomes that indicate success. The judging panel will consider projects that were undertaken in-house, with external consultancy, or using technology developed by service providers or vendors.
Category C: RegTech Awards
Within this category, our judging panel will recognise early stage and startup firms that have developed innovative regulatory technology or are using technology in unique ways to help financial institutions meet their regulatory requirements and address compliance challenges. This category, designed to allow younger innovative firms to be considered separately from more established solutions and service providers, will focus on the application of technology itself rather than the specific use case.
This category will recognise early stage firms and startups that have developed capabilities in the use of AI/machine learning that facilitate compliance with regulatory requirements or help the industry address risk management or governance challenges. This award will focus on the application of technology itself rather than the specific use case.
This category will recognise early stage firms and startups that have developed capabilities in the use of data or analytics to facilitate compliance with regulatory requirements or help the industry address risk management, governance or reporting challenges. This award will focus on the application of technology itself rather than the specific use case.
Category D: Industry Awards
Within this category, our judging panel will seek to recognise regulators, market infrastructures, exchanges, service providers, industry bodies, and other stakeholders that have made contributions to regulatory reform processes or facilitated compliance with regulatory requirements and objectives.
This category will recognise financial market infrastructures including payment systems, CSDs, securities settlement systems, CCPs and trade repositories. The judging panel will look for firms that have demonstrated leadership in initiatives aimed at modernising industry practices, enhancing overall efficiency and transparency, reducing cost, and minimising broader financial system risk.
This category will recognise stock and derivatives exchanges that demonstrate global or regional leadership, competitive advantages, an innovative culture, and a commitment to sustainability. Market growth, cost-efficient operations, fair market access and transparency will be key considerations for the judging panel in this category.
This category will recognise data providers whose services help financial institutions stay compliant with regulatory requirements. Data services may include reference data, market data, product data, credit data, watchlist data, or other risk intelligence data that are required to meet a regulatory need. The judging panel will look for comprehensiveness of data, ease of access, and cost relative to comparable alternatives.
This category will recognise law firms that have assisted financial institutions in their handling of regulatory and enforcement matters, particularly those that involve complex or multi-jurisdictional issues. The judging panel will especially consider efforts to lobby regulators on behalf of the industry or specific financial institutions. Client testimonials, case studies, published articles, white papers and media citations will also be considered.
This category will recognise consulting firms that have assisted financial institutions in managing regulatory issues, or advised on or facilitated implementation of regulatory projects. The judging panel will take an outcomes-based approach to assessing submissions, taking into account client testimonials, case studies, published articles, white papers, media citations and other information.
This category will recognise firms that specialise in providing compliance training services that help financial industry practitioners bolster their awareness and understanding of regulatory requirements and foster a strong compliance culture and mindset. The judging panel will look for firms that use innovative methods to facilitate learning. and can demonstrate strong uptake of compliance training programmes, with measurable results.
This category will recognise firms that help financial institutions understand and comply with legal and regulatory obligations, such as in areas relating to licensing, business setup, governance, risk management or other functions which require specialist expertise to commence or maintain operations in the financial sector. The judging panel will look for firms that are able to demonstrate outcomes-based success for the services they provide.
This category will recognise industry associations that focus on regulatory reforms, addressing compliance challenges, promoting financial system stability, and developing better practices and industry standards. The judging panel will also consider efforts to connect and educate industry professionals, promote harmonisation of regulatory requirements and standards across jurisdictions, and help to reduce the regulatory burden for the industry.
This category will recognise initiatives, projects, firms and solutions that have resulted in a significant contribution to advancing regulatory reforms that promote market integrity, financial system stability, and overall industry resilience to risk. The judging panel will consider efforts to improve industry practices and standards, advance conduct and culture initiatives, and enhance governance and risk management practices.
This category will recognise compliance teams within financial institutions that demonstrate a commitment to market integrity, sound risk management, and regulatory compliance. The judging panel will consider efforts to entrench sound culture within organisations, promote good market behaviour and conduct, and adopt a proactive approach to compliance.
Category E: Ones to Watch
Within this category, our judging panel will recognise new firms and solutions that are pioneering innovative applications of technology to meet regulatory requirements, but are either in an early stage of development or industry adoption.
Our judging panel will consider submissions made in other categories for awards in this category. Additional submissions are not required to participate.