Regulation Asia held its sixth annual Awards ceremony on 14 November 2023. Here we explain our methodology and announce the winners for the year.

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 more than 190 submissions.

METHODOLOGY

Firms were asked to complete a comprehensive questionnaire describing their solutions, projects and other efforts to meet changing regulatory requirements. The questionnaire also asked for documents, references, case studies, client testimonials and other materials to support the submission.

Regulation Asia’s editorial team provided an external panel of judges a set of criteria to use to assess the submissions and shortlist those with the most merit in each category. Judges were also asked to offer guidance on category appropriateness.

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 may be asked for additional supporting documents to evidence the merits of their submissions.

The panel of judges – comprising subject-matter experts from banks, associations, law firms, consulting firms and academia – was tasked with assessing and scoring each submission on pre-set criteria, based on the submissions, interview data and other supporting materials collected by the editorial team.

Each judge made their scoring decisions independently, without communicating with one another. All the submissions, interview data, and other supporting materials collected during the Awards process were subject to strict confidentiality.

Finally, the judges’ scores were compiled to determine the winners in each category. Each category has the benefit of multiple judge assessments, so that a consensus or majority view can be established. In categories where a winner cannot be determined or where the scores are close, input was sought from additional judges. In some categories, both a ‘winner’ (1st place) and ‘highly commended’ (2nd place) may be declared.

Below we present the results of the Awards process.

RISING STARS – These awards recognise start-ups and new entrants to APAC that have experienced rapid growth, demonstrate an innovative approach, or show significant potential for future expansion in the region.

Transaction Monitoring Solution

HAWK:AI was recognised for its transaction monitoring technology, which is powered by a combination of easily configurable rules and explainable AI and can significantly reduce false positive alerts while increasing true positive detection. [Read more here]

PEPs, Sanctions & Name Screening Solution

Aereve was recognised for its use of natural language processing (NLP) for screening and cross-border KYC assessments, particularly its ability to handle both Romanised and native Chinese characters in screening. [Read more here]

Consulting Firm – Market & Infrastructure

PIVOT Management Consulting was recognised for its client centric approach to delivering progressive solutions for capital market participants and market infrastructure institutions across India, including leading stock exchanges, clearinghouses, and depositories.

ESG Data & Analytics Solution

Fair Supply was recognised for its ESG platform, which enables companies to map their entire global supply chain and portfolios and identify exposures to modern slavery risk, biodiversity loss, Scope 3 GHG emissions and other ESG-related risks.

Digital Identity Verification Solution

Accura Scan was recognised for its digital KYC and identity verification solutions, which include capabilities for document scanning and reading, face match and liveness checks, authentication and verification, NFC chip verification, fingerprint biometrics, and voice liveness checks.

DIGITAL ASSETS – These awards focus on technology solutions and firms that help to promote regulatory compliance and a secure marketplace for digital assets.

Best Travel Rule Compliance Solution

Notabene was recognised for its SafeTransact platform, which allows users to perform counterparty screening, VASP due diligence and risk assessment, and exchange travel rule information, all with significant automation to simplify compliance management.

Best Market & Trade Surveillance Solution

Eventus was recognised for its Validus platform, which provides advanced trade surveillance capabilities and is used by some of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, in part due to the platform’s versatility, customisability, and scalability.

Best KYT/Transaction Monitoring Solution

Elliptic was recognised for its Navigator platform, which features powerful blockchain tracing capabilities and configurable risk rules that help users screen crypto transactions in real-time and reliably identify high risk activity at scale.

Best Investigations & Recovery Advisory

Chainalysis was recognised for its Crypto Incident Response Service, a rapid response retainer service that helps crypto firms prepare for cyber attacks and network intrusions, trace stolen crypto funds if an incident occurs, and accelerate response and recovery.

Best Blockchain Analytics & Investigations Solution

Chainalysis was recognised for its Investigations Solution, which is used by government agencies and private institutions to trace blockchain activity, unmask complex obfuscation techniques, and generate actionable intelligence to support investigations, prosecutions, litigation and seizures.

Best Institutional Custody & Asset-Servicing Solution

ChainUp Custody was recognised for its secure and scalable custody solution, which leverages distributed key storage technology, enables users to retain their private keys, and grants them full control of their digital assets with advanced security features. [Read more here]

Excellence in Digital Assets Compliance Programme

HashKey Exchange was recognised for a compliance programme that features high security standards, segregated accounts, ISO certifications, regular audits, and a stringent due diligence and suitability assessment programme for new token listings, among other things.

Consulting Firm of the Year

Synpulse was recognised for helping firms perform regulatory mapping and gap analysis for digital assets, analyse financial crime risks raised by digital asset exposures, and design and implement fit-for-purpose control frameworks for digital assets.

Law Firm of the Year

Clifford Chance was recognised for the advice provided to clients across areas such as blockchain and DLT, tokenisation, smart contracts, digital assets and CBDCs, as well as its participation in industry working groups and consortia to help shape the legal standards.

ESG & SUSTAINABILITY – These awards focus on technology solutions and firms that help to promote regulatory compliance with ESG and sustainability-related requirements.

Best ESG Disclosure & Regulatory Reporting Solution

S&P Global Sustainable1 was recognised for its 1-Click TCFD solution for identifying, evaluating, and reporting climate risks; and its Sustainability Portfolio Analytics Service, which enables firms to calculate and track carbon and environmental performance, perform scenario analysis, and quantify impact. [Read more here]

Best ESG Data & Analytics Solution

S&P Global Sustainable1 was awarded ‘best solution’ for its S&P Global ESG Score and Raw Data packages, which empower clients to accurately assess the ESG credentials of public as well as private companies to support their decision-making and reporting. [Read more here]

ICE was ‘highly commended’ for its ESG Company Data offering, which provides granular ESG-related data on over 16,000 companies across 105 countries, mapped to more than 1.4 million bond and equity securities. [Read more here]

Best Climate Risk Modelling & Assessment Solution

ICE was recognised for Climate Transition Analytics Tool, which provides access to reported Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions data from 5,500 global companies, modelled data for over 30,000 companies, and emissions reduction targets for over 2,500 companies. [Read more here]

Industry Collaboration of the Year

AXA (HK & Macau) & Capco (HK) were recognised for a jointly-developed climate-related risk management and reporting solution that supports TCFD reporting, quantitative climate scenario analysis, and investment portfolio-level climate risk management.

Law Firm of the Year

Mayer Brown was recognised for the extensive advice and client training it provides to firms on sustainable finance and responsible investment transactions, as well as climate change and transition, human rights compliance, corporate sustainability and diversity.

ESG Initiative of the Year

S&P Global Sustainable1 was recognised for its Nature & Biodiversity Risk solution, which provides corporates and financial institutions a quantitative approach to measure the impacts and dependencies of assets, companies, and portfolios on nature, in line with the TNFD recommendations. [Read more here]

BANK INTEGRITY & RESILIENCE – These awards focus on technology solutions and firms that help to promote regulatory compliance, institutional resilience, and stability in the banking sector.

Best Capital/Liquidity Calculation & Reporting Solution

Moody’s Analytics was recognised for Banking Cloud Credit Risk, which offers solutions to help banks address their regulatory compliance for capital, liquidity and stress testing requirements under Basel III and national requirements for around 30 supervisors.

Best Credit Risk Modelling & Management Solution

Moody’s Analytics was recognised for its s Credit Portfolio Solutions, which combine portfolio analytics and modelling capabilities to help banks identify, measure, and manage credit risk and analyse concentrations by industry, region, asset type, and counterparty.

Best FRTB Solution

S&P Global Market Intelligence was recognised for its Traded Market Risk solution, which allows financial institutions to comply with FRTB requirements, including through its cloud-native FRTB modellability data and analytics capabilities. [Read more here]

Best Regulatory Change Management Initiative

Adenza was recognised for RegCloud®, a data management and regulatory reporting SaaS offering which is provided alongside operational support and regulatory change services, including a dedicated global regulatory monitoring service that tracks over 90 jurisdictions for changes. [Read more here]

Excellence in Conduct Risk Management

LeapXpert was recognised for its Federated Messaging Orchestration Platform that enables employees to interact with clients on consumer messaging applications and voice channels while also ensuring record-keeping requirements are met and communication flows are retained for monitoring purposes.

Best Use of Artificial Intelligence

DBS Bank was recognised for a tool developed in-house to automate and streamline workflows in the payment investigation process, including data ingestion, decision-making, case management, escalation and communications to relevant parties.

Consulting Firm of the Year

Accenture was recognised for its work with multiple systemically important and other banks in areas ranging from financial crime compliance, Basel IV regulatory compliance readiness, operational resilience, and digital risk assessments. [Read more here].

MARKETS & INFRASTRUCTURE – These awards focus on technology solutions, infrastructure and firms that help to promote a safe and efficient marketplace and compliance with related regulatory requirements.

Exchange of the Year

National Stock Exchange of India was recognised for completing a number of significant initiatives in the past year, including transitioning equities to T+1 settlement, implementing numerous new investor protection measures, and operationalising the NSE IX-SGX GIFT Connect.

Best Market Surveillance Solution

Nasdaq Market Surveillance was recognised for its real-time, cross-market, cross-asset surveillance technology, which offers real-time visualisations, investigation management and reporting capabilities and is used by over 65 marketplaces and regulators globally. [Read more here]

Best Trade Surveillance Solution

Nasdaq was awarded ‘best solution’ for its Trade Surveillance technology, which allows market participants to gain a comprehensive and consolidated view of markets across multiple venues and asset classes. [Read more here]

Verint was ‘highly commended’ for Verint Financial Compliance, which can identify and transcribe over 40 languages to aid in surveillance, reviews, investigations and the detection of possible cases involving possible misconduct.

Best Trade Reporting Solution

Broadridge was recognised for futureLANDSCAPE, a multi-jurisdictional and multi-asset class solution that features a powerful rules engine and a comprehensive suite of functionalities that help automate trade reporting across different markets.

Market Infrastructure of the Year

DTCC won the category for its Global Trade Repository service (GTR), which provides the core infrastructure for derivatives trade reporting. The firm has been supporting major rule rewrites in APAC and elsewhere by creating message specifications and functional change documents. [Read more here]

Central Depository Services (India) Limited was ‘highly commended’ for providing a convenient and secure securities depository with now over 90 million. It recently implemented a new segregated account structure, a single sign-on for e-voting, and introduced the EDIS system.

Best Reference Data Provider

ICE was recognised for its reference data solution, which provides access to high-quality reference data on over 35 million financial instruments, including both active and inactive, across more than 210 markets globally, including ESG data on more than 16,000 companies across 105 countries. [Read more here]

Best Corporate Actions Solution

SmartStream Technologies was recognised for its TLM Corporate Actions and TLM Corporate Actions OnDemand platforms, which help firms streamline operational procedures, delivering data and event-driven workflows, process automation, and active alerting across the complete corporate actions event lifecycle. [Read more here]

Best Shareholding Disclosure Solution

Artius Global was recognised for delivering a complete automated end-to-end solution for global shareholding disclosures. It aggregates, monitors, and generates disclosure forms covering requirements across more than 100 capital markets.

Consulting Firm of the Year

DTCC Consulting Services was recognised for ongoing work to help firms to prepare for the ongoing revisions to OTC derivatives trade reporting rules and to support the introduction of a T+1 securities settlement cycle in the US and other jurisdictions. [Read more here]

Law Firm of the Year

Linklaters was recognised for advisory services provided to market participants covering regulatory matters, derivatives, structured products and digital assets, as well as its extensive work with ISDA, FIA and China’s NAFMII, and for advising HKEX on the successful launch of Swap Connect.

FRAUD & FINANCIAL CRIME – These awards focus on technology solutions and firms that help to bolster industry efforts to guard against illicit finance risks such as fraud and money laundering, and promote better financial crime compliance practices.

Best KYC, CDD & Onboarding Solution

Fenergo was recognised for Fenergo KYC, an API-first SaaS solution that helps financial institutions efficiently manage local and global KYC and due diligence requirements throughout the entire client lifecycle. It comes with sanctions and PEP screening, risk assessment, and identity verification capabilities, among other capabilities. [Read more here]

Best KYB & Entity Resolution Solution

Know Your Customer Limited was recognised for delivering a SaaS solution and single API solution that help to simplify, streamline, and automate all KYB  and UBO identification operations, now covering 129 real-time registry connections.

Best Client Lifecycle Management Solution

Fenergo was recognised for Fenergo Client Lifecycle Management (CLM), a SaaS platform that enables financial institutions to digitally manage the end-to-end client onboarding and lifecycle experience. It serves as a workflow and case management solution and helps to automate regulatory compliance processes through a rules engine that covers more than 120 jurisdictions. [Read more here]

Best Due Diligence & Third Party Risk Solution

S&P Global Market Intelligence was awarded ‘best solution’ for its KY3P® (Know Your Third Party) integrated suite of solutions for managing end-to-end third-party risk, encompassing vendor onboarding, oversight, due diligence, monitoring, and shared assessments. [Read more here]

S-RM Intelligence and Risk Consulting Limited (S-RM) was ‘highly commended’ for its corporate intelligence services and AI-driven real-time monitoring capabilities, which help firms detect and mitigate financial crime risks, broader
reputational risk, and specific vendor and third party risks.

Best Data Provider

Moody’s Analytics was awarded ‘best solution’ for the combination of Orbis and Grid. Orbis provides data on 462 million entities, including hierarchies linking entities, ownership, locations and people; while Grid offers a risk database of adverse media, sanctions, watchlists and PEPs.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence was ‘highly commended’ for its suite of data solutions that provides real-time and historical maritime data, including AIS data and vessel tracking capabilities, as well as data on vessel attributes, movements and ownership, data on ports, and sanctions data. [Read more here]

Best AML/CFT Data, Analytics & Visualisation Solution

FTI Consulting was recognised for Identif.AI, a financial crime compliance solution that uses advanced AI methodologies, deep learning neural networks, multi-lingual natural language processing and large language models to enhance red flag detection and reduce false positive rates.

Best Transaction Monitoring Solution

NICE Actimize was awarded ‘best solution’ for its comprehensive suite of AML solutions, which features a transaction monitoring platform that offers more than 70 AML scenarios and over 250 engineered models to choose from for deployment in a financial institution’s AML programme.

Feedzai was ‘highly commended’ for a transaction monitoring solution that provides dynamic customer risk ratings, machine learning alert prioritisation, and self-serviceability. It uses customers’ historical data to set a baseline for expected
behaviours that will generate higher rates of productive alerts.

Best TBML & Trade Compliance Solution

Lloyd’s List Intelligence was recognised for its Seasearcher Suite of data and analytics solutions, which empowers financial institutions to complete due diligence, conduct sanctions screening, investigate, and monitor compliance risks associated with maritime trade transactions. [Read more here]

Best PEPs, Sanctions & Name Screening Solution

LSEG World-Check One was awarded ‘best solution’ for offering an innovative solution to perform screening and due diligence, with over 4.8 million records and strict inclusion criteria to ensure accuracy, relevance, and alignment to legislation. The solution leverages over 500 researchers in 240 countries and territories. [Read more here]

Ripjar Ltd was ‘highly commended’ for Labyrinth Screening, which uses advanced AI to provide comprehensive screening against watchlists, sanctions, PEPs and news media,using natural language processing (NLP) to extract meaning from large quantities of unstructured data.

Best Anti-fraud Solution

LexisNexis Risk Solutions was recognised for ThreatMetrix, a scalable and effective anti-fraud solution” with real-time device and behaviour analysis capabilities. The solution leverages the LexisNexis Digital Identity Network to optimise detection, reduce false positive rates.

Anti-fraud Project of the Year

Group-IB was recognised for its Cyber Fraud Intelligence Center Project, built upon Group-IB’s proprietary Fraud Protection Platform. The solution is used for monitoring diverse data sets to generate insights on fraud threats and patterns, simplify fraud detection, and disrupt the laundering of fraud proceeds. [Read more here]

Excellence in Fraud Awareness and Education Programme

Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation was recognisied for Project Scrooge, an online cybersecurity awareness and education campaign that aimed to enhance cybersecurity and fraud awareness among clients, employees, and the general public and educate them on how to keep their accounts safe online.

Best Tax Reporting Solution

Regnology was recognised for its Regnology Tax, a centralised tax reporting platform that facilitates reporting to tax authorities in 140 countries for financial institutions and end-clients, as well as compliance with the CRS/AEOI, FATCA, DAC6/MDR, and QI regimes.

Best Compliance Training Provider

GRC Solutions was recognised for  Salt® Learning, which provides an online training solution including an off-the-shelf library of customisable courses covering a broad range of compliance-related topics, as well as an authoring tool to allow firm to develop their own learning content.

Best Use of Artificial Intelligence

Bank of Singapore was recognised for a project that uses machine learning to examine client behaviours and patterns and flag potential tax evasion. The project has been helping the bank identify clients who require more in-depth reviews, file more meaningful STRs, and uncover transactions linked to tax evasion. [Read more here]

Consulting Firm of the Year

FTI Consulting was recognised for its work with financial institutions such as on projects to redesign and implement a bank’s first party lending fraud operating model, and undertake an independent review of AML/CFT operating model across over a dozen APAC jurisdictions. The firm also supports AML compliance through its technology platforms.

Law Firm of the Year

Herbert Smith Freehills was recognised for its work to support clients in cross-border and domestic internal investigations, enforcement actions, civil litigation and arbitration claims, as well as advising on potential legal and regulatory exposures and managing crisis situations.

INDUSTRY AWARDS – These awards focus on organisations that have had a positive cross-sector impact to the industry in supporting regulatory compliance, promoting financial stability, and enhancing industry practices.

Industry Association of the Year

ISDA was recognised for its work providing fact-based advocacy, research and analysis across a range of initiatives and cross-industry collaborations, including its work on Digital Regulatory Reporting (DRR), LIBOR transition, initial margin compliance, digital assets and carbon markets. [Read more here]

Outstanding Contribution to Regulatory Reforms

Accenture was recognised for its collaboration with regulators and industry practitioners to shape the Responsible AI journey for Singapore, including work on the Veritas Initiative to develop and promote regulatory standards for the responsible use of AI and data analytics. [Read more here]

SPECIAL THANKS

Regulation Asia would like to offer our sincerest thanks to our judges for their time, dedication and hard work throughout the judging process. A list of the judges is available here.

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 a submission.

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 2022 winners, click here.

To see the 2021 winners, click here.

To see the 2020 winners, click here.

To see the 2019 winners, click here.

To see the 2018 winners, click here.