A common objection in compliance circles goes like this: why pay for regulatory intelligence when the regulator publishes everything online for free? It is a reasonable question. Regulations, enforcement notices, consultation papers and speeches are all publicly available, and placing them behind a login does not make them proprietary.

According to Corlytics, yet treating published documents as the whole picture misses most of the work. What firms see is only the visible layer: new rules, enforcement actions against firms, consultations inviting industry feedback and speeches hinting at supervisory priorities.

On their own, these are raw materials. The difficulty lies not in getting hold of them but in interpreting them accurately, consistently and at scale.

Beneath the surface sits a substantial and largely unseen infrastructure. Content must be gathered daily from hundreds of regulatory, supervisory, legislative and enforcement sources across many jurisdictions, each with its own formats, structures, languages and publishing conventions. Collecting it reliably is merely the starting point.

Every document then has to be followed through its lifecycle. Rules move from draft to consultation, through amendment, to final publication. Guidance shifts, and requirements are repealed and replaced. Without disciplined version control, organisations risk relying on outdated obligations or being unable to prove which version applied when a decision was taken.

This is a real-world issue. In its 2021 review of data collection, the Bank of England found that firms struggled to locate the latest reporting instructions and all related documents. Participants described understanding those instructions as ‘one of the biggest sources of avoidable cost’.

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