Welcome to The Demo Room – your front-row seat to the future of RegTech, RiskTech, and AI innovation.
In this series, we document our research interviews with the most forward-thinking vendors tackling the industry's biggest challenges. Each blog is built around a comprehensive product demo, providing clear insights into how these innovations address industry challenges.
On this occasion, we spoke to Ankur Mehta, CEO and Founder of ComplyLens.
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For years, firms have struggled to maintain a structured and comprehensive view of their market abuse risks. Risk assessments have traditionally been reactive—driven by regulatory pressure and built incrementally, with new controls added in response to emerging threats. However, regulators now expect firms to take a proactive, holistic approach to risk management, requiring a fundamental shift in how risks are assessed and managed.
Rather than applying generic risk assessments across the organisation, regulators are encouraging firms to document and evaluate market abuse risks at a granular level:
Business divisions – Investment banking, asset management, and wealth management each carry unique risk profiles.
Regional operations – A global bank must consider risk exposure in different jurisdictions.
Asset classes – The risks associated with equities differ significantly from those in fixed income, FX, or commodities.
Products and services – Each unit may trade multiple products (e.g., cash equities, derivatives, FX forwards, precious metals), each carrying distinct vulnerabilities.
“In our experience, the most effective assessments involve consideration of the different types of market abuse and how they apply across different areas of the business and asset classes.”
- Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in Market Watch 69
The Problem for Firms
While increased granularity leads to deeper insights which enable more targeted, specific risk mitigations, it also presents enormous challenges in scale and complexity. For instance, a global bank trading 50 distinct products, each associated with approximately 40 potential market abuse risks, must manage a risk matrix with around 2,000 unique risk scenarios. Each scenario requires an impact and likelihood assessment to establish an ‘inherent risk’ score. Furthermore, firms don’t just assess risks once—they must continuously monitor, track, and justify changes over time.
For global financial institutions, market abuse risk assessments are now large-scale operational challenges, requiring coordination across multiple desks, jurisdictions, and asset classes.
Existing Approaches
Despite advancements in risk assessment methodologies, many firms continue to struggle with execution. A reliance on inefficient, manual processes hinders their ability to assess, track, and respond to evolving risks effectively.
“Firms are investing a lot of manual effort, allocating new hires and existing compliance resources.” - Ankur Mehta, CEO and Founder of ComplyLens
Overwhelming Manual Effort
Many firms still rely on Excel-based workflows to conduct risk assessments. This results in:
Siloed risk tracking: Different business units conduct assessments separately, often without a central view.
Operational Inefficiency: Compliance teams spend months coordinating risk input from multiple desks, manually consolidating responses.
High error rates: Copy-pasting, version control issues, and lack of auditability increase regulatory risk.
Lack of Auditability
Regulators now expect firms to demonstrate how their risk profiles evolve over time. Yet, without a centralised system, firms struggle to:
Track who made changes, when, and why.
Compare risk assessments year-over-year without manual effort.
Justify why certain risks have increased or decreased.
“If a firm reports no changes over three years, regulators may see this as a red flag, suspecting risks are being copy-pasted rather than reassessed.”
- Ankur Mehta, CEO and Founder of ComplyLens
Slow, Static Assessments
Risk assessments today are often outdated by the time they are completed. In a six-to-eight-month risk review cycle:
New products, trading strategies, and market risks emerge before assessments are finalised.
Surveillance controls may fail, but assessments don’t dynamically reflect control failures.
Firms cannot quickly reassess risks when conditions change, limiting agility.
“There’s little value in a risk assessment that looks perfect in Q1, only for a key surveillance system to fail in April—yet the assessment still shows everything is fine at year-end.”
- Ankur Mehta, CEO and Founder of ComplyLens
The result: These limitations often result in inadequate risk assessments, which fall short of the regularity and granularity demanded by regulators.
A Solution
As part of our ongoing research into the use of technology in risk and compliance, we were given a demo of ComplyLens’ MARA Product. MARA is a centralised market abuse risk assessment platform designed to eliminate the manual inefficiencies, auditability gaps, and static views that plague current approaches. A number of capabilities stood out:
Comprehensive Market Abuse Risk Assessment Framework
Enables firms to conduct a holistic market abuse risk assessment by mapping all potential risks to their specific business models, products, services and teams.
Utilises the RCSA (Risk Control Self-Assessment) methodology to assess the likelihood and impact of risks, ensuring a structured approach to risk evaluation.
Provides predefined market abuse risk models covering various financial products, trading strategies, and emerging risks.
Streamlined Control Management
Facilitates the identification and mapping of controls to relevant risks, ensuring effective mitigation strategies are in place.
Allows assessment of control effectiveness based on design and performance, with automated calculations for residual risk.
Supports centralised control libraries where firms can manage, update, and test control frameworks efficiently.
Automated Tracking
Automates tracking of assessment progress, including completion statuses, assigned actions, and stakeholder involvement.
Maintains a robust audit trail, ensuring full traceability of changes to risk ratings, control mappings, and assessment results.
Provides version control and comparison tools to easily track how risks have evolved over different assessment periods.
Actionable Insights
Provides an intuitive dashboard with high-level risk assessment overviews and granular drill-downs into specific trading units.
Features out-of-the-box reports, including risk heat maps, assessment status tracking, and control effectiveness analysis.
Supports targeted remediation planning, allowing firms to assign and track compliance actions by business unit.
Parker & Lawrence’s view
The solution breaks down a large, complex, and seemingly unmanageable problem into small, structured steps. With ready-made workflows, risk frameworks, and calculations, firms can quickly get started, while the flexibility of the platform ensures that assessments are tailored uniquely to their circumstances. The ability to centralise controls, risk indicators, results, and actions within a single connected platform allows for real-time updates and decision-making.
In this context, automation is not a gimmick—there are no chatbots promising to solve everything in one step. Instead, it is a true efficiency play in an otherwise deeply inefficient process. By automating process management, firms earn the ability to act with greater precision based on deeper insights while freeing up teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
“We are empowering firms to automate process management so they can focus on the risk management”
- Ankur Mehta, CEO and Founder of ComplyLens
Looking ahead, we are particularly excited about potential integrations with data governance tools and processes, a growing priority in market abuse and trade surveillance, especially following major enforcement actions in 2024. Further integrations with trade and e-communications data, as well as expanding into additional risk domains like AML and fraud, will make this platform extremely well-rounded.
This is a ready-made solution for market abuse risk assessments, and we anticipate that it will soon become much more.
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