The Rigor of Regulation–PJ Di Giammarino, CEO of JWG – Keeping Up With Changing Complex Regulation in the New Digital Financial Market

PJ Di Giammarino, CEO of JWG, details the complex and sometimes convoluted topic of regulation, in an ever-increasing digital financial world.

Di Giammarino has over 20 years of experience in new technology designed to solve complex financial services problems and issues. For over a decade Di Giammarino has been the CEO of JWG Group, a prestigious think-tank that is internationally recognized by regulators, financial institutions, and technology firms. Di Giammarino has a vast network of the industry's leading technology specialists, policy makers, and global market leaders, all of whom he brings together to find solutions to global challenges through intensive collaborative working groups and collectives. Di Giammarino is recognized widely for his work with the MiFID Implementation Group and a wide range of RegTech forums. Prior to founding JWG Di Giammarino worked with Barclays Capital, Booz Allen, and McKinsey. He is a vocal and active member of many advisory groups and organizations including the International Organization for Standardization through the ISO UK committee for financial services, IST/12, and Di Giammarino serves as the Secretary for the FinTech Technical Advisory Group as well.

Di Giammarino talks about his firm and their immersion into RegTech, helping financial services define, understand, comply, and advance. He discusses the importance of bringing banking out of the analog era and into the new digital era and applying regulations and controls to help ensure the safety of transactions and accounts. RegTech, as he explains, pertains to the application of AI and new technologies to the financial sector and businesses in general. Di Giammarino states that banking has become very technical, and regulators have been forced to adjust and become technically savvy themselves, to meet the demands and keep pace with a rapidly changing digital financial sector.

Since 2006, JWG has held 400 working groups to focus on a variety of regulatory topics. He discusses the many action points that have come out of the G20 and others, and how the new changes are creating a glut of work for regulators and financial sector strategists. Di Giammarino talks about JWG's mission of using technology to apply to the new and voluminous regulatory data, to bring efficiency and streamline the process of adapting to changes. JWG's team scours the massive bundle of regulatory information and brings it into a manageable initiative that businesses can follow and implement.

The financial regulations expert delves into the many specific areas of regulation, and the tools companies can utilize to keep up. Transparency, as Di Giammarino states, is the answer to the crisis, as everything has to be on a report. With tighter regulation many more reports are generated on various subjects and areas, from trading activity, to how you know your customer, to money laundering checks, to how to manage capital and potential exposures. By defining more accurate language and standards, compliance is easier to implement and maintain. JWG's team of independent analysts assists senior executives within public and private sectors to determine how regulations can be implemented in the correct way. Essentially, their skilled analysts and technology leaders help financial services take control of global regulatory change by implementing a technology-enabled standardized approach.

Di Giammarino talks about how regulators across the globe are now communicating and sharing ideas, for the greater good of security for everyone. He states that the role of new technology is not really firm-by-firm, but is actually theme-by-theme. Continuing, he lays out the idea that whereas some regulators have an appetite to automate their rulebook, others are more focused on using blockchain to manage the problem of money laundering, thus the areas of interest and focus are varied.

Lastly, Di Giammarino discusses fear and greed, as the motivators of regulation. Regarding fear, the sheer volume of regulations has grown to the point that many businesses are afraid that they may be missing things that are critical. In terms of greed, the costs are often excessive, with a large amount of manual effort needed. Di Giammarino details the many ways that his team can facilitate the processes for security, data loss control, and management, etc. through the use of AI and technology.

Di Giammarino has been a consistent author and international public speaker for more than two decades on the role of new technologies for the financial services infrastructure.