Navigating Regulatory Compliance: The Asian Institute of Chartered Bankers (AICB) and Deloitte Lead the Banking Regulatory Register Initiative

KUALA LUMPUR, 13 DECEMBER 2024 – Since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), waves of new regulations have been introduced to strengthen banks’ governance, resilience and consumer protection practices. These reforms aim to foster prudent risk-taking among banks, ensuring the stability and sustainability of the financial system.

With an array of regulatory requirements coupled with increasing regulatory scrutiny, in particular on consumer protection, banks are required to continuously monitor the evolving regulatory landscape risk. This aligns with Deloitte's State of Compliance Survey, which highlights that compliance breaches and heightened stakeholder expectations have driven organisations to strengthen their compliance frameworks, enhance operational resilience, and align more closely with evolving regulatory landscapes.

Given the need for a more streamlined approach at navigating and assessing impact of new and existing regulations, the Asian Institute of Chartered Bankers (AICB), in collaboration with its Compliance Officers’ Networking Group (CONG), has launched an initiative to develop a Regulatory Register for the Malaysian banking industry. The Regulatory Register is a central repository which consolidates all relevant regulations into a single platform, for ease of tracking, assessing, updating and monitoring regulations. This initiative aims to provide regulatory clarity and operational efficiency across the banking sector. Deloitte has been appointed as the strategic partner to support AICB and CONG in building this comprehensive register.

“The Regulatory Register exercise is designed to be a one-stop centre for all Malaysian banking regulations by streamlining workflow processes and reducing unnecessary burden. Deloitte’s position in the FSI industry and track record in performing similar regulatory compliance engagements for individual Malaysia-based banking sector clients places us in an ideal position to support AICB in efforts to encourage and simplify regulatory compliance,” stated Dr Justin Ong, Regulatory & Financial Risk Leader, Deloitte Southeast Asia.

“With the increasing number of regulations issued in recent years, financial institutions have placed greater emphasis on strengthening and streamlining their compliance processes to reduce manual processing,” said Edward Ling, AICB Chief Executive. “Having a centralised repository containing these banking regulations would ease the process of ensuring compliance for our members. We look forward to working with Deloitte and our Compliance Officers’ Networking Group as we move towards a future with greater transparency and increased governance within the banking industry.”

In addition to establishing a more consistent, industry-wide approach to the monitoring of regulations, the exercise also looks to reduce the number of duplicate efforts and alleviate the burden that each player must bear, potentially leading to a reduction in operational costs for individual firms by increasing efficiency of resources. This streamlining of materials includes but is not limited to policy documents, exposure drafts, discussion papers, circulars, and directives, offering a holistic view of Malaysia’s regulatory universe.

The key activities for building the Regulatory Register include narrowing down on the types of regulatory documents and stakeholders’ preferred methods to host the register, along with the selection of stakeholders to conduct the subsequent mapping of the regulations, specifically, the mapping of each regulation to the applicable banking institutions, and their relevant departments, such as risk management, finance, or compliance.

The Regulatory Register exercise aims to respond to compliance officers’ challenges by introducing a more scalable solution to streamline documentation and extraction of regulations that will ease compliance processes, reduce duplicative efforts, and enable banking institutions to better manage the complexities of today’s regulatory environment.