Christian Le Hir, Chief Legal Officer at Natixis, is taking part in the panel “Companies and Regtechs: How Can They Be Harmonised?” at Paris Regtech Forum 2019.

What are regtechs, and what are their potential legal applications?

A portmanteau of regulation and technology, “regtech” is the name for the technology used by lawyers to facilitate data collection and decision making. Regtechs are useful tools that enable us to better manage the expansion of the legal and reglementary environment. Through artificial intelligence, they assist with certain tasks that are time-consuming or of little added value. In regard to the company’s data, they can help to better apply the regulations through textual comparison, targeted monitoring, dashboards, workflows, data manipulation etc.

Why is it so difficult to integrate regtechs into legal services? What are the main barriers to their adoption?

Companies are looking to integrate regtechs to improve, amongst other things, their regulatory security and operational efficiency. But they have not yet been fully integrated for a variety of reasons. Investment in them has been limited, which has proven to be an obstacle to the growth of start-ups. Often, businesses focus on ROI (return on investment). For the time being, regtechs only meet the criteria of improving productivity and reliability. Further, some startups only offer partial solutions, encouraging companies to develop their own in-house technology. Start-ups’ development is highly constrained by the current regulations, whose limited scope is unable to deal with companies’ broader needs, as demonstrated by the GDPR, for instance.

What is the future of regtechs?

The adoption of regtechs by companies is an ongoing process. They understand that these new systems support traditional activities and offer a high-quality service that is both efficient and competitive. Startups and regtechs could provide concrete solutions that facilitate compliance – for example in GDPR, where assistants and remediation systems are exploited to facilitate legal work, or even the PACTE law for business growth and transformation, whose large scope could be more easily put into practice through regtechs. Regtechs and legaltechs are thus still under development and could, in the near future, take on an increasing importance in decision-making and legal strategy.

Christian Le Hir, Chief Legal Officer at Natixis, is taking part in the panel “Companies and Regtechs: How Can They Be Harmonised?” at Paris Regtech Forum 2019.