For a fast-growing European payment platform, regulatory compliance can never be an afterthought. Serving customers across 37 countries in the EMEA region means complying with 37 distinct sets of regulations in 21 languages. A slight misstep can draw the ire of regulators and undermine customer trust.
In a post-2020 world, the pace of regulatory changes has picked up as EMEA regulators seek to tighten financial oversight to protect their respective economies. Penalties for a single misstep could be catastrophic, ranging from multi-million-euro fines to license suspension in a particular jurisdiction. That’s not to mention the loss of customer trust should non-compliance make the news.
Impact at a Glance
- Up to 40% less time spent on manual monitoring
- 3 days average detection lag, down from 28 days
- 0 Missed critical regulations since deployment
The Compliance Challenge
Each jurisdiction where the payment platform operates has its own set of financial regulations, anti-money-laundering laws, and payment processing requirements. All of these are prone to change at an unpredictable pace.
Needless to say, the company’s 12 compliance team members had their plates full.
Before the regulatory monitoring system was put in place, the team spent 60+ hours a week browsing regulatory websites, newsletters, and official gazettes to catch applicable changes in time. Despite all that work, it took an average of 28 days to detect a regulatory change.
Manual monitoring, while time-consuming, was far from the only bottleneck for the compliance team. As regulations came in 21 languages, they had to be translated and interpreted before anyone could make the call regarding their impact.
The human factor wasn’t helping, either: different team members routinely reached different conclusions when evaluating the impact of a new regulation. The result? Some regulations triggered false alarms, while other critical legislative changes flew under the radar, catching the team by surprise later on.
Solutions That Didn’t Work
The company had tried to solve its compliance challenge several times before reaching out to BN Digital. In 2023 and 2024, the company increased the team’s headcount, implemented off-the-shelf compliance software, and attempted to develop a proof of concept for a custom system internally.
However, none of these approaches worked:
- Hiring more people didn’t scale well, due to high turnover and extra hiring and operational costs
- Off-the-shelf compliance software was too costly and inefficient because it wasn’t adapted to the needs of payment platforms
- The proof of concept wasn’t completed on time, leaving the whole project in limbo
Wake-Up Call
In Q1 2024, the inefficiencies in regulatory monitoring caught up with the company, landing it in hot water. The team missed a critical change in AML reporting requirements in a central European market. So, when the time came to submit the AML report, the company didn’t provide all the necessary information to the regulator.
This one single missed regulation almost caused a hefty fine and a PR disaster for the platform.
The root cause behind this close call was evident: ineffective manual monitoring.
This was the company’s wake-up call: something had to be done about the regulatory monitoring and compliance. The C-suite decided to pause market expansion until they could be confident in the timeliness, precision, and effectiveness of regulatory monitoring processes. The solution was clear: the company needed an automated regulatory monitoring system adapted to its needs.
The Solution
Building the Foundation
Ensuring the new regulatory monitoring system would indeed be effective for the company required an in-depth discovery. To that end, the discovery phase included a comprehensive jurisdictional analysis and mapping of relevant regulatory sources.
The insights gained during the discovery phase also informed the regulatory taxonomy and impact scoring framework. A thorough analysis of historical regulatory data over the past six months ensured the framework was tailored to the compliance team's needs.
Launching the Pilot
The AI-powered pilot for an intelligent regulatory monitoring system was designed to solve three key tasks:
- Centralise all regulated activities, entities, and products in a single table, without redundancy or repetition
- Evaluate how relevant a given document is to the regulated items, at both the document and sub-document levels
- Link each item with a relevant document where it’s defined
The pilot system consisted of three key AI components: automated source monitoring, intelligent classification, and relevance and impact scoring.
Automated Source Monitoring
During the discovery stage, 80+ regulatory sources in 21 languages were identified as relevant for the payment solution provider. The automated source monitoring component checks each of these sources for new publications. Designed for multi-language support, it ingests and automatically translates publications in any of the 21 languages required.
As a result, the compliance team reports spending up to 40% less time on manual monitoring. The time saved is expected to increase over time as the solution’s output gains the team's trust.
Key features:
- Automated checks for new publications
- Integration for 80+ regulatory sources
- Multi-language document ingestion and translation
Intelligent Classification
The client’s historical regulatory assessments served as the training datasets for the underlying natural language processing (NLP) model. The training ensured that the model’s output aligned with the compliance team’s established approach to classification and impact analysis.
Thanks to this alignment, the team receives information on every new regulatory change in a familiar format, without having to adapt to a new taxonomy.
The intelligent classification component automatically classifies clauses into one of the following categories:
- AML
- Payment Processing
- Data Privacy
- Consumer Protection
- Licensing
- Cross-Border
- Other
The clause can also be sorted into three additional categories: obligations versus prohibitions, exceptions and waivers, and time horizons.
Key features:
- 10 categories defined based on historical regulatory assessments
- Automated per-clause classification across seven main categories
- Optional per-clause classification for three additional categories
Relevance & Impact Scoring
Once the clause is categorised, the system assigns a relevance and impact score between 0 and 10 to predict the consequences of the regulatory change for the client’s operations.
In line with responsible AI tenets, each impact score comes with a confidence indicator. Thanks to it, the team doesn’t have to guess how reliable the score is and can double-check the impact assessments if necessary.
That said, training the AI model on historical assessments enables it to return consistently precise impact scores. As one team member states, “The relevance scores are surprisingly accurate. I start relying on them now.”
Key features:
- Relevance scoring
- Impact scoring based on the predicted effect
- Confidence indicators for impact scores
How It Works in Practice
The regulatory monitoring system continuously checks the connected 80+ sources for relevant changes in legal requirements. Once it detects one, a compliance team member receives an alert on their dashboard. The alert specifies:
- Jurisdiction
- Number of applicable restrictions and obligations
- Date of entry into force
- Impact score, with a confidence indicator
Here’s an example of the alert:
A new regulation for Austria: 4 new obligations and 2 restrictions. Effective on: 1 January 2026. Impact score: 7, confidence 94%.
Thanks to these automated alerts, the client’s team members can focus on proactive analysis of the regulatory landscape instead of manually monitoring sources. The dashboard brings all alerts into one centralised place, reducing cognitive load and context switching. As one team member stated, "The dashboard is the first thing I check every day now.”
Training & Feedback Loops
To ensure the compliance team is fully aware of the system’s strengths and limitations, end users were trained to use the system. Its curriculum was tailored to the team’s existing processes so that the system could be introduced seamlessly into them, without much disruption.
This training enabled end users to make the most of the system and accelerate adoption. At the same time, it helped avoid confusion, frustration, and resistance to change.
As human feedback substantially improves AI model accuracy and relevance over time, the system is equipped with a feedback loop process. It enables team members to review the system’s output regularly, ensuring its alignment and reliability in the long run.
The Outcome
In early 2025, the client rolled out the regulatory monitoring system as a supporting tool. It is now used alongside existing business processes.
Following the system’s launch, the compliance team checks regulatory change sources twice a week instead of daily. That represents a perceived decrease in time spent on manual monitoring of up to 40%. The team expects the time savings to accrue over time as members become more used to it, and the high output accuracy builds trust in the system as a whole.
The system also enables the team to pinpoint critical regulatory changes nine times more quickly. Instead of identifying a relevant change 28 days after it’s published, the team now detects it in 3 days on average.
Perhaps most importantly, the team missed zero critical regulations since the system was deployed.
As the system consolidates all information on upcoming regulatory changes in one place, the team could add proactive regulatory landscape analysis to its reporting to the board. This provides executives with the visibility they need to make informed strategic decisions.
Now confident in the company’s compliance-monitoring capabilities, the board approved an expansion into five new markets in 2026.
Key outcomes:
- Up to 40% less time spent on manual monitoring, according to the team’s self-assessment
- Average detection lag reduced from 28 days to 3 days
- No critical regulatory changes missed since the system’s rollout
- Proactive regulatory landscape analysis added to board reporting
- Increased compliance monitoring capacity, enabling expansion into five new markets
Off-the-shelf RegTech solutions don’t meet your needs? Already had one too many close non-compliance calls? BN Digital can help you reduce detection lag, speed up regulatory monitoring, and provide strategic visibility into your obligations and restrictions.