Every market should have a robust regulatory and enforcement infrastructure to be a good citizen of the regulatory community. Financial institutions should be familiar with international and domestic standards in addition to more specific laws and regulations that support that infrastructure. Consequently, each institution, market and authority should have operational procedures that continually keep abreast of standard setter guidance and ideally, from time-to-time, should self-assess against relevant norms and benchmarks. Increasingly, the assessment process may require an institution or jurisdiction to determine if parts of its particular framework should be tweaked or changed to adapt to evolving market structures and products and to support innovation while fostering market integrity. Institutions and jurisdictions undertaking a self-assessment exercise may need external support to surmount internal resistance to the self-assessment process or to recommended changes. Such external support also may be essential to explaining the particular approaches of a market or institution to various mandated third-party assessors or validators with a view to avoiding needless structural inefficiencies, unduly burdensome design costs, and potentially ineffective remediations.
ALIGN, whose principal worked on many compendiums of international standards and practices, can help you benchmark your system by providing input from experience in multiple jurisdictions.
ALIGN also can provide assistance as to how to better explain your conclusions in the “language” of the relevant authority or "validator" and to respond to comments.
