Regulation Asia held its 4th annual Awards ceremony on Thursday (9 December) in an online event to announce the winners of the ‘Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence 2021‘. The awards programme is held each year to recognise excellence by firms that help to ensure the highest compliance standards are upheld in the financial industry, and have shaped the regulatory landscape in Asia Pacific.
This year’s awards programme saw 186 submissions.
Firms were asked to complete a comprehensive set of questions describing their solutions, projects and other efforts to meet changing regulatory requirements, as well as to submit supporting documents, reference, case studies, client testimonals and other materials.
Regulation Asia’s editorial team and judges were charged with shortlisting the submissions to identify those with the most merit in each category. The editorial team then conducted interviews with the shortlisted firms, and in some cases their clients, in order to obtain a more detailed picture of the strengths and weaknesses of each firm or solution and to enable a clearer comparison between the entrants. Some entrants were also asked for additional documents to evidence the merits of their submitted solutions.
An external panel of 26 judges – comprising subject-matter experts from banks, associations, law firms, consulting firms and academia – was tasked with scoring each submission on pre-set criteria, based on the submissions, interview data and other supporting materials collected by the editorial team.
In the interest of maintaining independence, each judge made their scoring decisions separately without any communication with one another. All the submissions, interview data, and other supporting materials collected in the Awards process were subject to confidentiality requirements.
The judges’ scores were compiled to determine the winners in each category. Each category had the benefit of multiple judge assessments, so that a consensus or majority view could be established. In categories where a winner could not be determined or where the scores were close, additional judge input was sought. In some categories, a ‘winner’ (1st place) and ‘highly commended’ (2nd place) were declared.
Below we present the results of the Awards process.
ONES TO WATCH
This category recognises new and emerging start-ups and solutions that are pioneering innovative applications of technology to meet regulatory requirements, but are either in an early stage of industry adoption, have a relatively new product or solution, or are only just entering the Asia Pacific market.
AML Governance
Arctic Intelligence was recognised for its risk assessment solutions, which replace spreadsheets and shared folders with platforms and workflows to better assess business exposures to financial crime. The technology helps establish a robust risk assessment framework and defendable, data driven results prepared for boards and regulators.
Regulatory Change Management
Corlytics was recognised for a platform solution that monitors, structures and maps complex global regulatory information to organisational frameworks, providing timely, relevant information directly to business areas. The solution is enriched with regulatory risk intelligence and analytics, enabling firms to plan and prioritise compliance and monitoring activities and determine exposure to regulatory risk.
Trade Reporting
Droit Financial Technologies was recognised for its Adept solution, a high-performance platform that allows capital market participants to evaluate thousands of automated trading decisions per second. The solution automatically codifies regulatory requirements, market microstructure and a firm’s internal policies into machine-executable logic. [Read more here]
KYC & Onboarding
AsiaVerify was recognised for two core solutions, which provide real-time data for the verification of business partners, corporate customers and individual clients in key Asian markets, most notably China. AsiaVerify also uses a sophisticated propriety algorithm to provide rapid and accurate translations of the data. [Read more here]
Digital Asset Compliance
TRM Labs was recognised for its single cohesive platform which includes modules for transaction monitoring, wallet screening, VASP due diligence, and forensics, as well as its extensive blockchain coverage and cross-chain analytics capabilities. [Read more here]
OUTSTANDING PROJECTS
This category recognises financial institutions and service providers that apply innovative techniques or technology solutions to address specific regulatory requirements, rewarding projects that deliver value in a way that sets them apart from industry peers.
BSBY Index
Bloomberg was recognised its credit-sensitive index, known as BSBY (Bloomberg Short Term Bank Yield Index), which serves as a supplement to SOFR and includes a credit spread and term structure. BSBY was developed to address a key market need in support of LIBOR transition efforts.
Market Access Initiative
Bursa Malaysia was recognised for its Bursa Anywhere mobile app, which provides investors easier and more convenient access to portfolio and investment information as well as electronic depository services, including timely notifications on corporate announcements and monthly statements. [Read more here]
Reporting Automation
RegCentric was recognised for REG360, which is designed to deliver a system-of-record for enterprise reporting. Its reporting hub enables team collaboration, data lifecycle management, integrated lineage and controls, traceability for regulatory reporting and enterprise analytics.
Best RegTech Initiative – Capital Markets
ActiveViam was recognised for its FRTB Accelerator, which provides business logic, pre-packaged source code and BCBS-prescribed formulas to compute capital requirements for market risk. It can run both the SA (standardised approach) and IMA (Internal Models Approach), in parallel if needed. [Read more here]
Best RegTech Initiative – Data & Analytics
Smarsh was recognised its Enterprise Archive solution, which provides financial firms an unalterable record of their digital communications for supervision, audit, and discovery purposes, and providing fast and consistent access to the exported data in a single archive, with no single point of failure. [Read more here]
Best RegTech Initiative – Reg Reporting
Vizor by Regnology was recognised for its work with key APAC regulators over the last two years to implement new data collection platforms, which allow for the collection of more granular sets of data, better administration and tracking of submissions, and improved visualisation and analysis of data. [Read more here]
REGTECH AWARDS
This category recognises firms that are playing a leading role in developing new and emerging technologies, using them in unique and innovative ways to help financial institutions meet regulatory requirements.
AI & Machine Learning
Smarsh was declared ‘Winner’ for its use of artificial intelligence to help supervision teams perform smarter review of communications content through its Enterprise Archive solution, which provides financial firms an unalterable record of their digital communications. [Read more here]
Data Analytics & Visualisation
Quantexa was declared ‘Winner’ for Contextual Decision Intelligence (CDI), a modular and integrated platform with the ability to connect internal and external data sets to provide a single view, enriched with intelligence about the relationships between people, places and organisations. [Read more here]
DLT & Blockchain
Chainalysis was declared ‘Winner’ for its KYT solution, which enables firms to monitor counterparties, obtain real-time intelligence on the source or destination of their funds, and evaluate the risk associated with the blockchain addresses they control.
Onchain Custodian was ‘Highly Commended’ for its SAFE platform, which offers institutional grade custody of digital assets and provides certainty to investors that their assets are held securely. The platform is fully scalable and supports multiple categories of digital assets.
BEST SOLUTIONS – Institutional Resilience & Integrity
The category recognises solutions that financial institutions leverage to meet regulatory demands and stay compliant in areas related to institutional resilience and integrity.
Capital & Liquidity Modelling & Stress Testing
Adenza was declared ‘Winner’ for its Basel Liquidity Risk Management solution, which enables clients to automatically integrate original data from disparate sources, model risk, perform regulatory calculations, visualise the information on dynamic dashboards, and generate and submit reports. [Read more here]
ElysianNxt was ‘Highly Commended’ for an enterprise risk solution suite which allows firms to run regulatory, finance and risk calculations, simulations and stress tests. The platform is high performance and highly scalability.
Regulatory Change Management
Fenergo was declared ‘Winner’ for its Regulatory Rules Engine, which automatically identifies in-scope regulations and determines the data and documentation required to support and expedite
the compliance process, thereby future proofing its clients against regulatory change.
Market Risk & Stress Testing
ICE Data Services was declared ‘Winner’ for ICE Portfolio Analytics (IPA) platform, a cross asset portfolio analytics solution that helps traders and sales staff at financial institutions manage risk and run stress tests on their investment and trading portfolios. [Read more here]
Credit Risk Modelling
Moody’s Analytics was declared ‘Winner’ for its RiskCalc™ and CreditEdge™ solutions, which optimises credit and financial risk practices through the end-to-end credit life cycle, incorporating counterparty risk assessment, risk-based pricing, stress testing, capital planning, and impairment calculations – among other capabilities. [Read more here]
Conduct Risk Management
MyComplianceOffice Ltd. was declared ‘Winner’ for its compliance management platform, which allows firms to monitor and manage conflicts of interest and conduct risk within their organisations. The platform can be fully integrated with a firm’s workflows and processes. [Read more here]
Regulatory Reporting
Wolters Kluwer was declared ‘Winner’ for its OneSumX suite of solutions, which enables financial institutions to address increasingly complex regulatory data and reporting requirements, leveraging an upgraded regulatory engine that dramatically improves execution speed and performance. [Read more here]
Vizor by Regnology was ‘Highly Commended’ for its reporting software developed specifically for financial institutions, leveraging the same technology and rules engines used by regulators. The API-powered platform reduces manual errors, administrative burden and compliance risk. [Read more here]
BEST SOLUTIONS – Financial Crime Compliance
The category recognises solutions that financial institutions leverage to meet regulatory demands and stay compliant in the areas related to financial crime compliance.
Due Diligence & Third Party Risk
Exiger was declared ‘Winner’ for its DDIQ solution, an AI-powered automated due diligence and risk detection solution that comes with pre-integrated data sources, and allows firms to identify, validate and analyse risk indicators globally at high speed and at scale. [Read more here]
Dow Jones & Company was ‘Highly Commended’ for its RiskCenter | Third Party solution, which is used for end-to-end third party risk management, sanctions screening, enhanced due diligence, and other use cases. The solution unites workflow-driven technology tools with risk data and due diligence capabilities.
Digital Asset Compliance & Analytics
Elliptic was declared ‘Winner’ for its broad spectrum of services designed to help cryptoasset business meet AML/CTF requirements, covering everything from onboarding and screening to customer monitoring and investigations. [Read more here]
Client Lifecycle Management
Fenergo was declared ‘Winner’ for its Client Lifecycle Management solution, which digitally transforms and streamlines onboarding, data integration, client and counterparty data management, compliance reviews and remediation, and client offboarding.
Cybersecurity
FTI Consulting was declared ‘Winner’ for its cybersecurity solution, which helps ensure organisations meet their unique compliance requirements and implement the necessary and appropriate controls to safeguard critical assets including personal and sensitive customer information, intellectual property, and investments.
AML/CTF Compliance
NICE Actimize was declared ‘Winner’ for its Consolidated Anti-Money Laundering Platform, which helps financial firms comply with local, regional, and global AML and CTF regulations, leveraging data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning – covering all aspects of financial crime compliance. [Read more here]
Napier Technologies was ‘Highly Commended’ for its Intelligent Compliance Platform (ICP), which covers transaction monitoring, transaction screening, name screening, perpetual KYC, risk scoring, and suspicious transaction reporting from within a single integrated platform. [Read more here]
Anti-Fraud
Quantexa was declared ‘Winner’ for Contextual Decision Intelligence (CDI), a modular and integrated platform that creates a networked view of customer relationships and use graph analytics enabled context to detect fraud risk. [Read more here]
LexisNexis Risk Solutions was ‘Highly Commended for its suite of fraud management and identity solutions, which allow firms to apply the appropriate level of security-related friction for every interaction across the customer lifecycle to prevent fraud.
PEPs & Sanctions Screening
SWIFT was declared ‘Winner’ for its sanctions testing service as well as its newly-launched real-time transaction screening solution, which combines a web-based screening application, automatic list updates, an alert management service, API integration capabilities, sophisticated rules, and configuration options. [Read more here]
Oracle was ‘Highly Commended’ for providing a holistic solution for PEPs and sanctions screening that leverages what is considered one of the industry’s best matching engines, enabling screening of more than 100 million records daily. [Read more here]
KYC & Onboarding
Shufti Pro Ltd was declared ‘Winner’ for its state of the art identity verification solutions, which leverage liveness detection checks, mobile ID verification, OCR for structured and unstructured documents, and video KYC to facilitate safe and fraud-free onboarding.
Oracle was ‘Highly Commended’ for its KYC solution, provides real-time customer onboarding, continuous monitoring, built-in watchlist screening, KYC risk assessment and scoring, and case investigation, with additional CDD and EDD capabilities. [Read more here]
Trade & Sanctions
Pole Star was declared ‘Winner’ for PurpleTRAC, a vessel screening solution that integrates screen the vessels against sanctions watchlists, while also integrating carbon emissions and environmental impact data to assess a vessel’s sustainability risk.
BEST SOLUTIONS – Markets and Infrastructure
The category recognises solutions that financial institutions leverage to meet regulatory demands and stay compliant in the areas related to payments, markets and infrastructure.
Market Abuse & Surveillance
Eventus Systems was declared ‘Winner’ for its Validus platform, which combines surveillance, market risk, AML and transaction monitoring in the same platform, helping firms to quickly identify and address potential risky behavior and bring greater efficiencies to their risk monitoring capabilities.
Trade Reporting
Broadridge was declared ‘Winner’ for futureLANDSCAPE, a multi-jurisdictional, multi-asset class solution which consolidates a firm’s regulatory reporting operations into a single platform, providing translation, validation, eligibility and enrichment to ensure compliance across jurisdictions. [Read more here]
Shareholding Disclosure
FundApps was declared ‘Winner’ for its shareholding disclosure solution, which monitors disclosure requirements for major shareholding, short selling and takeover panels, and ensures disclosures are made on time without error.
Reference Data Provider
ICE Data Services was declared ‘Winner’ for its high-quality reference data, which includes identification and settlement information, global terms and conditions, cross-reference security identifiers – on over 35 million financial instruments covering more than 210 markets. [Read more here]
Corporate Actions
IHS Markit was declared ‘Winner’ for its enterprise grade corporate actions software solution, which streamlines the collection, validation, and dissemination of corporate actions announcements, thereby enabling firms to automate and accelerate the corporate actions processing lifecycle. [Read more here]
SmartStream Technologies was ‘Highly Commended’ for its TLM Corporate Actions platform, which enables effective corporate actions governance through event driven automation and active alerting, leveragin real-time diary management through the complete event lifecycle.
Initial Margin Compliance
TriOptima was declared ‘Winner’ for its triCalculate and triResolve Margin services, which provide full support for initial margin compliance, including IM calculation, back-testing, margin workflow automation, collateral settlement and reconciliation. [Read more here]
IHS Markit was ‘Highly Commended’ for its end-to-end workflow SaaS tool, which delivers a complete margin ecosystem to automate and streamline the entire collateral management cycle – from accurately calculating IM and settling margin calls to managing disputes. [Read more here]
LIBOR Transition
ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was declared ‘Winner’ for its IBOR Fallbacks Protocol, which enables market participants to incorporate robust fallback provisions into their legacy non-cleared derivatives trades referencing LIBOR, significantly mitigating systemic risk. [Read more here]
ESG Data Provider
Moody’s was declared ‘Winner’ for its ESG Score Predictor, which uses a proprietary scoring methodology and advanced analytics to generate the best approximation of 59 ESG and climate metrics for any company worldwide, based on location, sector, and size. [Read more here]
INDUSTRY AWARDS
This category recognises market infrastructures, exchanges, industry associations, and service providers that help the financial industry comply with regulatory requirements.
Exchange of the Year
Bursa Malaysia was declared ‘Winner’ for its robust pandemic response, sustainability and ESG work, climate action leadership, market access initiatives, and for creating a conducive environment for innovation. [Read more here]
Compliance Service Provider of the Year
Deacons was declared ‘Winner’ for its the compliance, licensing and regulatory legal services it provides to Hong Kong and global clients in areas related to SFC licensing, banking regulation, AML, corporate governance, and fintech.
Law Firm of the Year
Herbert Smith Freehills was declared ‘Winner’ for its work to help clients address regulatory challenges in areas that include regulatory change, enforcement, investigations, governance, risk management, compliance, market conduct, complaints handling, and financial crime.
Mayer Brown was ‘Highly Commended’ for its work advising on banking, securities, commodities and insurance regulations, and helping clients with compliance, licensing, investigations, and enforcement action – including in areas such as AML and sanctions.
Market Infrastructure of the Year
CLS was declared ‘Winner’ for its multi-currency cash settlement service, CLSSettlement, which helps to address the most significant risk in the FX market – settlement risk – using a PvP mechanism to settle payment instructions simultaneously, in real time and with finality. [Read more here]
Data Provider of the Year
Moody’s Analytics was declared ‘Winner’ for its extensive datasets, which includes economic data, consumer and commercial credit data, publicly rated credit data, public and private firm credit and financial data, commercial real estate data, financial data, entity data, ESG data and more. [Read more here]
Compliance Training Provider of the Year
RUSI (Royal United Services Institute) was declared ‘Winner’ for its training activities that help governments and businesses in Asia strengthen their CPF (Counter Proliferation Financing) compliance efforts, is a global security priority, and a challenge that is particularly acute in the APAC region.
Consulting Firm of the Year
PwC was declared ‘Winner’ for the services and support provided to financial institutions by its Risk Consulting team in Singapore, which includes work in four core areas – risk and regulatory reporting, financial risk management, financial crime compliance and risk mitigation, and cyber and forensics. [Read more here]
Synpulse Singapore Pte. Ltd. was ‘Highly Commended’ for its work to help clients address regulatory challenges, including those brought on by the pandemic. Key projects for the year included work on ESG gap assessments, periodic KYC review enhancements, and a data management framework uplift project. [Read more here]
Industry Association of the Year
ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was declared ‘Winner’ for its work on LIBOR transition, initial margin compliance, Basel III benchmarking, digitisation initiatives, a new digital documentation platform, and ESG standards. [Read more here]
ICMA (International Capital Market Association) was ‘Highly Commended’ for its work to promote resilient well-functioning debt markets, including its extensive work to develop and set standards for global sustainable finance markets.
Regulation Asia would like to offer our sincerest thanks to our judges for their time, dedication and hard work throughout the judging process.
The judges included Jamil Ahmed, Douglas Arner, Reuben Athaide, Richard Carrick, Wilson Cheung, Grace Chong, Beaver Chua, Bill Coen, Rashmi Dubier, John Ho, Philip Keller, Lapman Lee, Derek McGibney, Barnaby Nelson; Mark Nuttall, Aude Rousseau, Guy Sheppard, Kristi Swartz, Brian Tang, Henry Wu, Martin James Wallis, and TK Yap, CFA – and four others who elected to remain anonymous.
In recognition of the considerable effort that was put in from across the industry to participate in the Awards programme, we would also like to thank all the teams from all the firms who entered the awards.
Regulation Asia is honoured to have developed the Awards platform in a way that meaningfully recognises the work the industry does each year to keep up with rapidly changing regulatory requirements.
To see the 2020 winners, click here.
To see the 2019 winners, click here.
To see the 2018 winners, click here.
