The Regulatory Knowledge Maze

The Challenge

Regulatory reporting had become a labyrinth. Knowledge was scattered across 16 legacy systems, multiple departments, and three geographies. A handful of senior specialists had become the de facto gatekeepers — the only people who truly understood which quality measures mattered in which context, what auditors would ask, and how to navigate quarter-end complexity.

Every regulatory change triggered the same pattern: delays, escalations, and bottlenecks funneling through the same overloaded experts. Closing cycles stretched to 10 business days. Costs climbed. Junior staff learned slowly, if at all.

The Knowledge Landscape

This wasn’t a simple data problem. The bank’s regulatory knowledge spanned all three dimensions:

• Structure: Structured data in core systems and databases, semi-structured XBRL and JSON files, unstructured policy documents
• Provenance: Internal processes, risk policies, and ETL logic intertwined with external regulatory requirements and auditor expectations
• Knowledge Types: Deterministic key figures, stochastic risk calculations, and the experiential judgment that only comes from years of knowing what regulators actually care about

The Approach

Full lifecycle engagement: Design Workshop → Fixed-Price Implementation → Pilot → Ongoing Service (still active).

The hardest part wasn’t technical — it was trust. The knowledge gatekeepers had built their careers on being indispensable. Only when leadership committed to the change, and the experts experienced their own workload dropping, did resistance give way to relief.

The Impact

Metric	Before	After
Closing cycle	10 business days	3 business days
Legacy systems	16	Consolidated
Annual reporting spend	Baseline	–30%
Risk-weighted assets	Baseline	Double-digit % reduction
Team headcount	Baseline	–40%

Time to value: First Go decision at 6 months. Consistent, measurable KPIs at 9 months.

The Human Story

The junior analysts finally got access to senior thinking — not through years of shadowing, but through structured knowledge capture. Career paths in regulatory accelerated.

And the gatekeepers? They stopped being bottlenecks. The stress lifted. One described it as “finally being able to take a vacation without my phone buzzing every hour.”