Aptus.AI's journey at the Fintech Milano Hub, from the BankIT Call for Proposals 2021 to now

The selection of our machine readable regulations for the Fintech Milano Hub

More than seven months have passed since the official announcement of the selection of our Artificial Intelligence proprietary technology among the “first projects admitted to the support of the Fintech Milano Hub, the innovation center with which the Bank of Italy intends to give concrete support to the digital evolution of the financial market” - as the Institute wrote in its communication. Our innovative electronic and machine readable format of financial regulations was among the 10 projects chosen - from more than 40 applicants - to benefit from the great opportunity to collaborate directly with the national Regulator in the banking field. Thus, the validity of our project aimed at drafting banking regulations in machine readable format was also validated by the Bank of Italy's Call for Proposals 2021 committee, which focused on “the contribution of Artificial Intelligence to the improvement of banking, financial and payment services delivery”. From that moment, our six-month journey within the Fintech Milano Hub began, aimed also at laying the groundwork for the possible publication of regulations in machine readable format directly by the Regulator.

Expectations met (and exceeded): the success of our project and the future developments 

In the context of the Fintech Milano Hub, we had the opportunity to cooperate directly with a team of professionals from the Bank of Italy, together with whom we set shared and challenging prototyping, testing and validation goals. Today, as the conclusion of this cooperative period is near, we can say with satisfaction that all the goals set initially have been successfully achieved. For some aspects, the reached goals even exceeded the initial expectations, which obviously had to take into account the existing state of the art and critical issues. The positivity of this path can only leave us proud and confident for the future. Also hoping that we will again have the chance to work with BankIT, thus the National Regulator itself, in order to revolutionize the banking regulatory environment and enhance law accessibility - our most important goal at Aptus.AI. Given the great results achieved in these six months, the possibilities that would open up with an ongoing and structured collaboration are all to be discovered, but certainly they would give a great help to continue in the process of digitization and efficiency of the Italian and European banking sector.

The importance of the Fintech Milano Hub for Aptus.AI and for the banking innovation in Italy

What has just been said acquires even greater value when one considers that Regulatory Technology - better known as RegTech - represents the future of the financial world, according to all industry authorities among the European Union, as we have written several times in our blog posts - as in this one, for example. In fact, also the tests conducted within the so-called Innovation Facilitators - namely Regulatory Sandboxes and Innovation Hubs, among which Fintech Milano Hub, precisely, is included - are going in the direction of RegTech - and machine readable regulations. Quoting the words of the communication published seven months ago by the Bank of Italy, “Milano Hub represents an important place to dialogue with the market and support the development of innovative solutions based on approaches that adequately take into account the need to balance opportunities and risks” thanks to “groups of experts who will support the development of each of the selected projects”.

The Aptus.AI project for BankIT in a nutshell: a RegTech as a Service at the service of the human being

We have already introduced what would have been the technical contents of our project in the context of the Fintech Milano Hub, but we consider it appropriate to briefly summarize the goals of our work in these months. As is known, in hyper-regulated contexts such as banking, finance and insurance, the accessibility of regulatory data, thus of laws, is essential to enhance the efficiency and sustainability of the processes that are followed daily in these same sectors. That is why the possibility of writing and publishing regulations in a machine readable format - thus electronic and standardized - would bring several advantages, including the possibility of profitably applying Artificial Intelligence tools to the automatic analysis of regulatory contents - as happens within our SaaS designed for the RegTech market, Daitomic. This would result in a service model definable as “RegTech-as-a-Service” (RaaS), which would enhance the effectiveness of the processes of analyzing and understanding regulations, through services in on-demand mode designed to meet the needs of different categories of users, both with respect to regulatory and geographic areas. To sum up, our proprietary Artificial Intelligence technology offers faster, more accurate and comprehensive consultation of the law, in a cross-regulatory and cross-country context, while also enabling a reduction of the costs of transposing regulatory updates. Most importantly, it enables humans to save time for high-value operations, such as decision-making and strategic activities, by receiving accurate legal information in real-time. In these six months, in the context of the Fintech Milano Hub, the cooperation with BankIT has certainly laid a solid foundation for our work aimed at the accessibility of banking laws not only on the side of the recipients of regulations, but also on the side of the Regulator. And it has also left us increasingly convinced and motivated to continue our journey aimed at revolutionizing financial compliance, at first, and the whole regulatory landscape as the final goal.