1. Let start with a brief introduction, what can you tell us about CUBE and your RegTech offering?
CUBE is a global RegTech provider empowering regulated financial institutions to meet cross-border compliance challenges head on. We work with the world’s leading financial institutions – from global banks to nimble fintechs and payments – to simplify their compliance challenges. We capture regulatory data from across the globe, process it, and transfer it into highly contextualised and meaningful regulatory intelligence for our customers.
In terms of our RegTech offering, we have a diverse offering with two distinct products, as well as a number of services and partnerships. We apply leading techniques in machine learning, natural language processing, and robotic process automation across our products to make complete sense of regulatory data and tailor it to our customer’s profiles.
RegPlatform is our modular, enterprise product, providing regulatory intelligence for large, global financial institutions that want to manage regulatory change on a global scale. RegPlatform can feed into CUBE Solutions to solve for compliance across any and all business areas, from cybersecurity to records and ESG.
RegAssure is our highly intuitive, nimble product that offers seamless compliance to lean financial organisations with up to a handful of compliance officers. We also offer a Regulatory Inventory Assessment Service, which automatically generates a tailored, holistic inventory that spans the entirety of your legal and regulatory requirements to reveal the gaps in your regulatory data. Visit our website at cube.global to find out more.
2. What are some of the biggest challenges that your solution solves for clients?
The biggest challenge we solve is enabling our customers to keep on top of every regulatory change and development that is relevant and meaningful for their business. Using artificial intelligence, CUBE has machine-read the entire regulatory internet, classified every change down to a granular level, and can intelligently deliver a watertight, standardised regulatory inventory for our customers.
In short, we take the whole world of regulatory data and transform it into regulatory intelligence. This enables our customers to enhance their risk management systems, boost efficiency, save time and mitigate the risk of human error. It simultaneously frees up highly-trained compliance officers from manually trawling the regulatory internet – allowing them to focus instead on implementing meaningful regulations.
Could you give us a use case of why a client came to you and how they are using
your solution to solve their particular challenge?
One client, a large US bank, had a pre-existing, automated regulatory change solution, but it wasn’t driving automation or efficiency. By its own admission, the system worked – but there were things that it wasn’t happy about and it wasn’t confident that its existing offering worked. The organisation had been using a legacy regulatory change system for some time. It was going through organisational change and wanted to streamline compliance operations across the board.
As well as procedural inefficiencies, the bank was also looking to fill some gaps that had appeared in its existing regulatory inventory. It also wanted a product that would map its relevant regulations through to its controls, and that could integrate with its existing GRC program.
CUBE deployed RegPlatform with a full suite of RegPlatform’s Modules, including RegInsight, RegBook, RegOntology, and RegFlow. CUBE was able to address the bank’s existing inefficiencies and consolidate all its systems into one solution. One of the frustrations of its legacy solution was that it had to use a content provider, software provider, summaries provider etc. CUBE consolidated everything into one seamless, market-leading solution.As a result, the bank increased efficiencies by 50% as well as saving valuable time. CUBE also enabled the organisation to reduce compliance costs significantly as it had previously employed legal service providers to bolster its legacy system. The US bank is now able to do considerably more with less from a capital standpoint, by virtue of having a better tool.
4. How would you describe the differences between your offering from others in your RegTech category?
CUBE’s main point of difference is the breadth and depth of our regulatory data. Other RegTech providers often make bold claims about the strength of their data, but CUBE has built its regulatory inventory over 10 years and boasts the world’s most comprehensive source of regulatory data. We capture regulatory change across 180 jurisdictions and in 60 languages, translate it all into English, standardise its format and compile it in a highly functional and configurable library.
As well as this, we are using truly advanced technology in artificial intelligence (AI) natural language processing, and machine learning. So as well as harnessing the whole world of regulatory data, we are able to make sense of it and draw intelligent connections within our proprietary Ontology – so our customers receive relevant, meaningful results instead of a generic data feed.
Finally, and importantly, CUBE actually works. We often hear from companies that have deployed a RegTech solution that quickly becomes outdated or fails to deliver on promises made. CUBE works, and provides a future-proof platform that will continue to provide relevant, up-to-date regulatory intelligence long into the future.
5. What advice would you give to decision makers when choosing a RegTech solution such as the ones you offer?
The advice we would give decision makers within the industry when choosing a RegTech solution is to consider the cost of their existing manual processes. Managing regulatory compliance is not easy, especially across multiple jurisdictions, it can feel like scaling a mountain but with no end in sight. As an organisation it’s important to take stock of your current processes and calculate the time compliance officers spend on manual-based tasks. And to ask themselves is this sustainable and scalable?
Is there an easier way of automating some of the processes in order to provide compliance teams with the tools they need to take a better risk-based approach? Most financial companies CUBE has as a client have asked themselves just this, and discovered that manual methods cannot scale, they cannot adapt quickly and they cannot sustain.
6. Due to the global pandemic a lot has changed in the world in the last year. How has your company changed in the last 12 months?
CUBE is intrinsically a digital-first business – a technology company that has been built on the premise of virtual working, so the transition to a life working from home for the CUBE team across the globe was a straightforward one. With that in mind, the inner-workings of CUBE haven’t changed over the last 12 months. While a lot of industries unfortunately struggled during the pandemic, we actually saw an increase in interest for RegTech solutions. Covid-19 forced financial services to ‘go digital’ and many took time to pause and take stock of their existing technologies, systems, and controls. Many saw weaknesses in their existing compliance systems, as it became apparent that manual or legacy products aren’t equipped to keep up in a modern – chiefly technological world. With that in mind, the main change we saw was actually growth.
7. Can you tell us about some of your most recent achievements or milestones you’ve reached?
In keeping with the above question, 2021 has been a year of successive achievements for CUBE – having made multiple key hires and scaling the size of our team at pace. This has boosted our success, and we’ve been thrilled to announce that a number of new customers and partners have joined our regulatory intelligence revolution including Revolut, Zurich, and PwC. As well as this, CUBE has launched a new product, RegAssure, meaning we now have a product suite that suits both global, enterprise financial organisations through our RegPlatform while simultaneously catering for lean, nimble organisations with RegAssure.
8. What drives you as a company and what is CUBE’s long-term vision?
In a nutshell, we are driven by a vision to become the industry standard for all regulatory intelligence. There is an incredible amount of regulatory data that currently exists, and it’s constantly growing in volume and complexity. We want to take all that data and make sense of it.
Right now, there are around 180 countries across the globe that have a regulatory framework of some description in place for financial services. In all these countries there are thousands and thousands of issuing bodies that set out specific financial regulations. In addition, there are thousands more issuing bodies that create other legislation and regulation which may also apply to financial services – such as privacy, cyber security, or taxes. These are all done in up to 60 different languages, and can be produced and distributed in any way, shape or form.
A quick and direct way of solving this problem is by taking an open, standards-based approach. In the long term, our vision is to create a market standard and common model for regulations, then give financial institutions and regulators the option of signing up to it.
9. What are some of the important developments you are seeing in the RegTech industry?
The main developments we’re seeing within RegTech at the moment is an emergence of products and solutions aimed at managing environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors. Consumers, regulators and governments are all demanding far-reaching change in the way that financial services manage ESG. Given the increasing pace of change in regulatory material, the volume of the material that’s being produced, and the complexity of the policies involved – the only way to address these challenges is through RegTech. So RegTech is evolving to meet this unique challenge.
We’re also seeing an emerging need for regulatory standards – financial regulators and financial institutions alike are starting to realise that the most efficient way to manage financial regulation is if there is global standardisation and consistency. So, there will definitely be developments surrounding the standardisation of huge volumes of regulatory data.
10. What’s next for CUBE?
We will continue to focus on, as we have always done, the quality of the product. With the introduction of RegBrain, CUBE has expanded beyond machine reading the regulatory internet into machine understanding. RegBrain is a data learning layer that sits on top of our existing data transformation AI layer, which powers our collection, standardisation, translation, enrichment, and validation of global regulatory content. Through RegBrain, CUBE is connecting data (and metadata) from across CUBE’s entire
regulatory universe in the ultimate knowledge graph. This semantic understanding unlocks a multitude of advanced AI capabilities for our customers, from regulatory change prediction to personalised insights to task automation. The most immediate application has been to further increase the relevance of regulatory data for our customers, down to the individual user level.
12. What’s the best way for potential clients or investors to get in touch with you?
The best way to get in touch is to visit our website – cube.global – and request a demo to speak to a member of our team. While you’re there, we recommend you sign up to our CUBITS newsletter to receive the latest content and news from CUBE.