Season 5, Episode 6: Regulatory Taxonomies and Machine-Readable Regulation with Alex Khachaturian

Notes To My (Legal) Self

Alex Khachaturian serves as a Director in FINRA’s Office of Financial Innovation (OFI) in Washington, DC. Alex supports OFI’s mission in the identification and analysis of emerging technologies, laws and regulations, business models, and industry practices (both domestic and international) to inform FINRA’s risk management and strategy goals. His primary area of focus, in recent years, has been at the intersection of technology, law, and regulatory compliance. Alex’s professional background includes several years of federal government service, law firm practice, and operations within global financial institutions.

Facilitating compliance through innovation will be a key area of focus for years to come in the financial services industry. The industry is increasingly relying on technology to improve both internal operational functions as well as regulatory compliance. In this context, regulatory taxonomies (i.e., a method of classifying and categorizing a hierarchy of key legal, business, and regulatory terms and concepts) have been seen as a way to make regulations more easily processed by a computer and, therefore, potentially less time-consuming and costly for a firm’s legal and compliance staff to review. In addition, application programming interfaces (APIs) can be used to ingest rule content, including the application of regulatory taxonomies to rules.

Join Olga and Alex as they discuss how technology-based tools can allow financial market participants to potentially enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of their compliance efforts, thereby supporting investor protection and market integrity.