레그테크(RegTech)의 도입과 규제법학의 과제

Right after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the market participants such as financial institutions face a great change of regulatory environment. Much more complicated regulations are implemented in order to protect consumers and secure the safety of the transaction and activities. In the meanwhile, new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, data mining, blockchain, sharing economy platform are emerging and broadly used in new industries. Countless of new start-ups which are using these new technologies spring everywhere. This article deals with “RegTech” and this new word comes from the intersection of these two phenomena (the change of regulatory environment and the emerging of new technologies). RegTech can be defined as “the use of new technologies to facilitate regulatory compliance more effectively and efficiently based on the cooperation among market participants, regulators and policy-makers.” In the beginning, RegTech has been used especially in a financial sector but now it is being spread out to a diverse range of industrial sectors, such as healthcare, social network, telecommunication, and self-driving vehicle industries. RegTech is expected to increase effectiveness, reduce the risk of human errors, and consequently achieve efficiency in terms of regulatory compliance. Not only for market participants, but also for policy-makers and regulators, the rapid change of regulatory environment requires them to adopt RegTech to monitor and review the situation of regulatory compliances. Without using new technologies, regulatory agencies have great difficulty in regulating properly and effectively. Nevertheless, RegTech also faces some risks and challenges, including the risk of systemic errors, data and privacy protection, and elevated costs. The role of regulatory law is to figure out the solutions to these problems for the market participants and regulators. To take advantage of RegTech properly, the shift of regulatory paradigm is necessary. To be specific, the optimal point between ‘rule-based regulation’ which is considered better in terms of machine-readable regulation and ‘principle-based regulation’ which is regarded as more flexible for new industries has to be figured out by policy-makers and regulators. And regulators, policy-makers and market participants should cooperate with one another to facilitate the standardized RegTech system. In addition to that, the monitoring system on RegTech by human beings should be implemented to secure the safety and stability of the system.