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Wayfinding: The TestLab 2022 Journey
We built TestLab to provide a controlled environment for the OSC, innovative businesses, and capital market participants to experiment, learn, and improve together in a real-world testing environment.
Setting Out on a Path of Discovery
When we embarked on our journey of designing TestLab, we were determined to focus our first test on an area that could have an immediate impact.
We set our sights on RegTech and its potential to transform the way registrant firms, advisors, and investors approach and benefit from evolving regulatory requirements, including the recently implemented Client Focused Reforms (CFRs).
Why RegTech? It offers a unique opportunity to address regulatory change, simplify workflows, reduce friction, and improve outcomes for investors – but its adoption has been a gradual process.
To better understand RegTech’s potential, we surveyed key stakeholders to hear their perspectives on its use. Specifically, we wanted to know how technology could help improve the advisor-client relationship and support better outcomes. Respondents revealed that registrants manually complete processes like the know-your-client (KYC), know-your-product (KYP), and suitability assessments – indicating a strong potential for RegTech to help.
Registrants and investors alike shared insights into opportunities they saw for leveraging RegTech solutions to ease some of their current pain points.
Challenges Highlight Opportunities for Improvement
We heard our respondents and used their feedback to develop two distinct “problem statements” that we posed to RegTech innovators:
1. Making product information more accessible
How can technology or other innovative solutions help registrants more effectively share, collect, assess and compare current product information and provide this information to their clients?
2. Improving information sharing and enhancing client interactions
How can technology or other innovative solutions help registrants collect and assess client information to better understand and respond to their clients’ investment needs, and improve their communications with their clients?
We set out to find innovative solutions to our problem statements through an open call for applications. We were fortunate to receive diverse interest extending well beyond Ontario.
In the end, we selected seven RegTech solution providers to be test participants based on the solution’s responsiveness to the problem statements, the scope of the testing plan, readiness to test, and other factors. We then joined forces to experiment, learn, and improve together.
Here’s the path the participant’s journey followed, with testing spanning from spring to winter 2022:
