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Genome’s first industry collaborators

24 March 2021

The article at a glance

CMS, Grant Thornton UK LLP, Macfarlanes, and Mastercard to collaborate with the Regulatory Genome Project at the University of Cambridge, a new machine-readable repository that allows firms to easily understand their global risks and obligations.

First industry collaborators: CMS, Grant Thornton UK LLP , Macfarlanes, and Mastercard to collaborate with the Regulatory Genome Project.

Robert Wardrop.
Dr Robert Wardrop

Regulation in the digital era is highly complex and globally fragmented, with rules changing at a rapid pace. To address this issue, CMS, Grant Thornton UK LLP, Macfarlanes, and Mastercard are supporting a new initiative, the Regulatory Genome Project (RGP), a collaboration between Cambridge Judge Business School and RegGenome, a spin-out company from the University of Cambridge, to reduce fragmentation in how information about regulatory requirements is shared globally.

The RGP supports adoption of an open information structure called the Cambridge Regulatory Genome, which is designed for machine learning in order to help keep track of the fast-growing body of regulatory information in the digital age.

The Regulatory Genome Project will help regulators create interoperable frameworks to reflect rapidly changing global rules in the financial services industry, while also helping firms understand and abide by these rules. It promotes real-time understanding of an ever-shifting body of laws and requirements, while bringing clarity and transparency to the global financial system.

Johan Gerber, Executive Vice President, Security & Cyber Innovation at Mastercard said, “Our collaboration with this project will put the power of technology to work, helping regulators and organisations across the globe keep pace with the accelerated developments related to the continued digitisation of financial services.”

The cross-industry commitment underlines the Project’s scope and ambition: the vast amount of global regulation in the digital economy means that humans cannot compile such a repository alone, so the Project uses machine learning and natural language processing to convert human-readable text into machine-readable code. This enables the creation of a comprehensive, searchable and digestible body of regulations that will provide quick and relevant information on any company’s risks and obligations.

Dr Robert Wardrop, Management Practice Professor of Finance and Director of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) at University of Cambridge Judge Business School, and founder of the RGP, said, “The Regulatory Genome Project aims to promote financial inclusion in the global digital economy and a de facto standard for regulatory compliance by firms operating around the world. We expect to announce many other collaborators joining the project in the coming months.”