Solving Financial Regulatory Compliance Using Software Contracts

Abstract: Ensuring compliance with various laws and regulations is of utmost priority for financial institutions. Traditional methods in this area have been shown to be inefficient. Manual processing does not scale well. Automated efforts are hindered due to the lack of formalization of domain knowledge and problems of integrating such knowledge into software systems. In this work we propose an approach to tackle these issues by encoding them into software contracts using a Controlled Natural Language. In particular, we encode a portion of the Money Market Statistical Reporting (MMSR) regulations into contracts specified by the clojure.spec framework. We show how various features of a contract framework, in particular clojure.spec, can help to tackle issues that occur when dealing with compliance: validation with explanations and test data generation. We benchmark our proposed solution and show that this approach can effectively solve compliance issues in this particular use case.