Sure enough, new regulations introduced after the 2008 financial crisis require firms to collect, aggregate and report unprecedented amounts of data, and integrate complex rules into their business workflows. And yes, these rules are open to diverging interpretations and not always harmonised globally. But at the root of the paradox is the industry’s extreme state of technology fragmentation: often within a single organisation, the same data is represented in many different ways through multiple systems. This results in highly complex regulatory implementations that have escalated into uncontrolled costs, still without guarantee of compliance: how do you prove adherence to a rule, when the logic is buried deep into a maze of disparate systems? This opacity also challenges regulators’ supervisory mandate and damages market transparency.