Regulation Asia held its 9th annual Awards ceremony on 5 November 2026. Here we announce the winners in each category.

Now in its ninth year, the Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence 2026 recognises the financial institutions, technology providers, legal and consulting firms, and individuals that have helped shape Asia’s regulatory landscape.

The winners were announced at a gala dinner ceremony in Hong Kong on 5 November 2026, celebrating those at the forefront of compliance, risk management, and innovation.

Regulation Asia would like to thank all participants and extend our congratulations to the winners, highly commended, and rising star entrants.

Methodology

The Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence is a rigorous programme designed to ensure every award represents true excellence and leadership. The entire process, from submission to final decision, takes more than three months to complete.

Entries were invited from across the Asia-Pacific region, attracting submissions from regulators, financial institutions, specialist technology vendors, advisory firms, and academic institutions. Entrants were asked to complete a comprehensive questionnaire describing their solutions and projects, and to provide supporting documents, case studies, and client references.

Regulation Asia’s research and editorial teams, working with an external panel of judges, first assessed all submissions to create a shortlist. This year’s panel comprised 24 expert, independent judges - all industry leaders, former regulators, and academics - who brought impartial expertise to every decision.

The awards spanned several main categories: Fraud & Financial Crime, Digital Assets, Markets & Infrastructure, Payments, Advisory & Innovation, Bank Risk, Resilience & Integrity, and our Industry Awards. Each shortlisted submission was reviewed by at least three different judges and scored across weighted criteria.

Finally, the judges’ scores were compiled and normalised to determine the winners. In cases where the margin between submissions was exceptionally narrow, the editorial team conducted a deeper analysis of the judges’ qualitative notes and comments to uncover the standout elements that differentiate the entrants.

In some categories, where warranted, a ‘Winner’ was declared along with ‘Highly Commended’ or 'Rising Star' entrants. The ‘Highly Commended’ recognition is awarded to firms that surpass a calculated scoring threshold, recognising their exceptionally high standards regardless of whether they were chosen as Winners. The 'Rising Star' recognition highlights emerging firms or newer initiatives showing exceptional promise and early impact.

Digital Assets | Payments | Markets & Infrastructure | Advisory & Innovation | Bank Risk, Resilience & Integrity | Industry Awards | Fraud & Financial Crime

Digital Assets - This category recognises the innovators driving transparency, compliance, and trust in the digital asset ecosystem.

Best Digital Asset Monitoring & Surveillance Solution

• Winner: BlockSec Phalcon - Recognised for deep on-chain analytics and tracing, live client deployment, and a disciplined model requiring AI findings to be corroborated on-chain.

• Highly Commended: TRM Labs - Recognised for delivering actionable, glass-box risk intelligence across 184+ blockchains and a new AI-assisted investigative tool that accelerates fund tracing and alert triage.

• Rising Star: Beosin - Highlighted for its regional address data and support for law enforcement investigations.

Best Digital Asset Risk, Tax & Reporting Solution

• Winner: S&P Global Tax Solutions - Recognised for helping shape digital asset tax reporting rules, evidenced by its role on the OECD Business Advisory Group and coordination of the industry's response on Singapore's CARF guidance. [Read more here]

Digital Assets Advisory Firm of the Year, Consultancy

• Winner: Prosynergy Consulting Limited - Recognised for building deep, practical expertise in Hong Kong's virtual asset licensing regime, with a record of client outcomes that can be checked against the public register. [Read more here]

Digital Assets Advisory Firm of the Year, Legal

• Winner: A&O Shearman - Recognised for advising on landmark tokenised bond work in Hong Kong, playing a critical role with a material positive impact on the local digital asset ecosystem. [Read more here]

Regulatory Initiative of the Year, Digital Assets

• Winner: HashKey Exchange - Recognised for stablecoin distribution and institutional integration initiative, which executed the region's first-ever live commercial premium settlement using a regulated stablecoin.

Payments - This category recognises solutions managing compliance and risk across real-time and cross-border payment rails.

Best Payments Compliance & Risk Solution

• Winner: LSEG Risk Intelligence - Recognised for offering payee verification and sanctions screening through one contract and API, closely aligned with the region's new name-matching and shared-responsibility rules. [Read more here]

Stablecoin Initiative of the Year

• Winner: Anchorpoint Financial Limited - Recognised for moving from the HKMA's stablecoin sandbox to become one of the first two issuers licensed under Hong Kong's Stablecoins Ordinance, setting an early benchmark for the region.

Markets & Infrastructure - This category recognises firms that are transforming the foundations of our markets, helping to promote a safe and efficient marketplace.

Best Reference Data Provider

• Winner: S&P Global Market Intelligence - Recognised for solving a hard regional problem by creating identifiers and documented listing evidence for Chinese listed bonds across the mainland's exchanges and interbank market. [Read more here]

Best Market, Trade or Comms Surveillance Solution

• Winner: Eventus - Validus platform - Recognised for combining real-time and T+1 monitoring, advanced automation, and a new natural language AI tool to detect complex market abuse.

• Highly Commended: NICE Actimize - Financial Markets Compliance - Recognised end-to-end solution that unifies trade and communications surveillance, trade reconstruction, and AI-powered analytics.

• Rising Star: LeapXpert - Recognised for capturing and applying real-time risk detection to off-channel messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat, directly feeding into enterprise surveillance systems.

Best Trade Reporting Solution

• Winner: DTCC - Recognised for its Trade Reporting Analytics, which gives firms a clear view of how their reporting performs across regimes and asset classes, built on its Global Trade Repository. [Read more here]

Collateral Management Provider of the Year

• Winner: Broadridge Financial Solutions - Recognised for delivering enterprise-wide, cross-product collateral optimisation and real-time liquidity mobilisation, including innovative intraday repo capabilities.

• Highly Commended: S&P Global Market Intelligence - Collateral Manager - Commended for covering the collateral lifecycle in a single layer, mapped closely to Hong Kong's margin rules. [Read more here]

Exchange of the Year

• Winner: National Stock Exchange of India Limited - Recognised for launching India's first exchange-traded electricity derivatives market and leading the region in capital formation with a record number of IPOs.

Market Infrastructure of the Year

• Winner: DTCC - Recognised as the only genuine cross-APAC trade repository, delivering Hong Kong's reporting rewrite and completing its Asia-Pacific cloud migration. [Read more here]

Advisory & Innovation - This category recognises standout advisory work and novel initiatives solving real regulatory, risk, or compliance problems.

Innovation Centre of the Year

• Winner: OCBC Group Compliance - Recognised for a sustained seven-year compliance innovation programme, from dynamic trigger monitoring to an agentic platform, with assurance built in via an independent Validation Agent. [Read more here]

Regulatory Advisory Firm of the Year, Consultancy

• Winner: Accenture - Recognised for its strong regional practice and influence in shaping policy, including Singapore's industry AI risk management toolkit. [Read more here]

• Rising Star: Synergy Consulting Group - Highlighted for achieving seventeen client authorisations in a year from a ten-person team, a record many larger firms would envy. [Read more here]

Regulatory Advisory Firm of the Year, Legal

• Winner: King & Wood - Recognised for leading ISDA's advocacy on China derivatives reforms, acting as legal architect for HKMA's Project EnsembleTX, and drafting new Offshore CNY provisions for the 2026 FX Definitions.

Regulatory Innovation Project of the Year

• Winner: SGX RegCo - Recognised for unprecedented cross-border regulatory harmonisation, importing US disclosure standards and safe harbours into Singapore law. [Read more here]

• Highly Commended: OCBC Group Compliance - Commended for bringing prospecting, due diligence, and source-of-wealth checks into one original operating model. [Read more here]

Bank Risk, Resilience & Integrity - This category recognises technology solutions and firms that help to promote regulatory compliance, institutional resilience, and stability in the banking sector.

Best Regulatory Reporting Solution

• Winner: Nasdaq AxiomSL - Recognised for the breadth of its regulatory coverage and a common platform relied upon by global systemically important banks to adapt as rules change.

• Highly Commended: Regnology Reporting Hub - Commended for successfully moving a whole regional client base onto APRA's new D2A supervisory reporting platform before the deadline.

Best Sustainable Finance & Climate Solution

• Winner: XDI (Cross Dependency Initiative) - Recognised for its Climate Hub, which adds specific value for asset owners, regulators, and insurers with methodological rigour and excellent data coverage.

• Highly Commended: MSCI - Recognised for solutions suite that provides consistent, globally aligned climate risk analytics, emissions data, and geospatial physical risk assessments.

Best Capital & Risk Management Solution

• Winner: Regnology - Recognised for combining rule-level knowledge of prudential regimes across Asia-Pacific with a platform that brings capital calculation and regulatory reporting together.

Best AI Governance & Model Risk Management Solution

• Winner: Solytics Partners' AI & Model Risk Ecosystem - Recognised for unified ecosystem that governs traditional models, GenAI, and autonomous AI agents on a single inventory with a unique runtime verification layer.

• Rising Star: CONFIDE - Recognised for AI Governance platform which embeds configurable playbooks, risk assessments, and human-in-the-loop oversight directly into daily enterprise workflows.

Excellence in Operational & Cyber Resilience, Banking

• Winner: DBS Bank - Recognised for developing an operational resilience framework that features an industry-leading 4-hour recovery tolerance and the deployment of advanced AI agents for continuous risk monitoring.

Industry Awards - This category recognises organisations and leaders who have made lasting contributions to our industry in supporting regulatory compliance and promoting financial stability.

Industry Association of the Year

• Winner: The International Capital Market Association (ICMA) - Recognised for standards that carry real weight in Asia, including the GMRA and its Bond Data Taxonomy, shaping how local markets develop.

Regulator of the Year

• Winner: Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) - Recognised for building Hong Kong's regulated digital-money system, opening a stablecoin regime, issuing digital bonds, and ensuring every bank met operational resilience standards on schedule.

Fraud & Financial Crime - This category recognises excellence in combating fraud and financial crime — a critical area in protecting trust and integrity across financial systems.

Anti-Fraud Project of the Year

• Winner: The Hong Kong Association of Banks (HKAB) - Recognised for helping secure the legal safe harbour banks needed to share account information, and building the industry mechanism to act on it together. [Read more here]

• Rising Star: Aereve - Highlighted for testing its work with three regulators in a single year, placing strongly against established institutions. [Read more here]

Best AML/CTF & Sanctions Data Provider

• Winner: Bloomberg - Recognised for the precise structure of its sanctions data, including corporate hierarchy, implicit sanctions, security mapping, and multi-tier portfolio look-through. [Read more here]

• Highly Commended: LSEG Risk Intelligence - Commended for providing independent assurance over its regional sanctions lists. [Read more here]

Best Client Lifecycle Management Solution, In-house

• Winner: HSBC AMH RBW Data & Analytics & RTMM Mule Management - Recognised for its Dynamic Risk Score (DRS) capability, which continuously monitors customer behaviour and consolidates fragmented signals for effective mule detection.

Best Client Lifecycle Management Solution, Technology Provider

• Winner: S&P Global Market Intelligence - Recognised for a genuine client-lifecycle platform that keeps due diligence current by combining perpetual KYC and event-driven review with a golden record. [Read more here]

• Highly Commended: WIDTH - Commended for solving the hard problem of bringing fiat and on-chain monitoring into one client record and testing its name matching on an open benchmark. [Read more here]

Best Compliance Learning Platform

• Winner: LRN - Recognised for its Catalyst platform, offering over 200 compliance courses in over 70 languages, and its Ethical Culture Pulse which gathers culture signals within required training.

Best Cross-Border Initiative Against Fraud and Financial Crime

• Winner: TRM Labs | Beacon Network - Recognised for a real-time network where one verified flag reaches every member at once, replacing slower bilateral request chains between institutions.

Best Digital Identity Verification Solution

• Winner: Glocal Identity Verification & Fraud Prevention Solution - Recognised for ability to combat sophisticated deepfakes, 3D masks, and synthetic identities.

• Highly Commended: LSEG Risk Intelligence - Commended for tying its identity verification accuracy claims to accredited laboratory testing.

Best Fraud Risk, Detection or Analytics Solution, In-house

• Winner: IWPB Fraud Strategic Analytics team, HSBC - Recognised for dual-stage real-time detection architecture that intercepts unauthorised account takeovers and APP scams with sub-millisecond latency.

• Highly Commended: Livi Bank - Recognised for in-house AI platform that identifies hidden connections, deepfakes, and emerging fraud networks during remote onboarding.

Best Fraud Risk, Detection or Analytics Solution, Technology Provider

• Winner: Clari5 - A Perfios Company - Recognised for leading fraud detection at a national scale, scoring transactions in under 60 milliseconds against 340 million accounts at a single site.

• Highly Commended: TruValidate™ Device Risk (TransUnion) - Commended for returning device intelligence in about 100 milliseconds at very large volumes before payments complete.

Best KYC & Onboarding Solution, In-house

• Winner: OCBC Group Compliance - Recognised for HELIOS, which brings source-of-wealth research forward to the prospecting stage, cutting private banking prospect research from a month to under a day. [Read more here]

Best KYC & Onboarding Solution, Technology Provider

• Winner: NICE Actimize - Recognised for unifying onboarding orchestration, perpetual KYC, advanced screening, and agentic AI on a single entity model.

• Rising Star: QCC KYC - Recognised for corporate KYC/KYB platform, which provides data depth on over 400 million Chinese entities and automates complex cross-border ownership resolution.

Best Sanctions, PEPs & Adverse Media Screening Solution, Technology Provider

• Winner: LSEG Risk Intelligence - Recognised for very broad, independently assured risk-data coverage, mature matching, and unusually strong evidence on update latency. [Read more here]

• Highly Commended: NICE Actimize - Recognised for 4th-generation name matching, cultural intelligence across 23 cultures, and AI-powered adverse media screening to significantly reduce false positives.

Best TBML & Trade / Sanctions Compliance Solution, In-house

• Winner: Standard Chartered - Recognised for replacing isolated transaction alerts with contextual, network-driven monitoring for trade-based money laundering across several markets. [Read more here]

Best TBML & Trade / Sanctions Compliance Solution, Technology Provider

• Winner: LexisNexis® Risk Solutions® - Recognised for Firco Trade Compliance, a mature sanctions and export-control platform with strong dual-use coverage, vessel intelligence, and automation.

• Highly Commended: Solytics Partners - Recognised for a platform that uses graph-based scenarios and network analytics to uncover complex TBML typologies and hidden relationships.

Best Due Diligence & Third-Party Risk Solution

• Winner: AsiaVerify - Recognised for direct connection to primary government registries across 14 APAC jurisdictions to deliver real-time entity verification and recursive cross-border UBO tracing.

• Highly Commended: Solytics Partners - Recognised for AI-powered platform that provides a entity-centric operating layer for continuous due diligence, complex ownership resolution, and adverse media screening.

• Rising Star: Confide - Recognised for its AI-powered system that transforms third-party due diligence into a continuous process by connecting vendor risk with internal governance data

Best Transaction Monitoring Solution, In-house

• Winner: Security Bank Corporation - Recognised for its AI transaction monitoring initiative that transforms fragmented alerts into structured, investigator-ready narratives and drastically reduces manual data retrieval time.

Best Transaction Monitoring Solution, Technology Provider

• Winner: NICE Actimize - Recognised for combining advanced machine learning, entity-centric intelligence, and self-service strategy management to deliver speed and adaptability at enterprise scale.

• Highly Commended: SymphonyAI - Recognised for engine-agnostic AI augmentation layer that integrates with legacy systems to drastically reduce false positives.

Excellence in Compliance Training & Awareness

• Winner (Professional Development): Academy of Excellence in Financial Crime Investigation and Compliance, Griffith University - Recognised for offering rigorous, credit-bearing financial crime education co-designed with practitioners and assessed on investigative judgement.

• Winner (Professional Development, In-house): Hua Xia Bank, Wealth Management and Private Banking - Recognised for programme which shifted compliance training from a passive exercise to a practical, technology-supported capability model for frontline wealth managers.

• Winner (Awareness & Capability Building): ICMEC Australia - Recognised for pioneering initiative that brings together FIs, law enforcement, and regulators to share intelligence and disrupt child sexual exploitation and abuse.

• Winner (Awareness & Capability Building, In-house): OCBC Group Compliance - Recognised for tying its source-of-wealth training to measured change, testing participants' knowledge before and after the programme to show genuine behavioural uplift. [Read more here]

• Winner (Best Compliance Learning Platform): LRN - Recognised for its Catalyst platform, offering over 200 compliance courses in over 70 languages, and its Ethical Culture Pulse which gathers culture signals within required training.

• Highly Commended (Professional Development, In-house): SHBank Finance Company Limited (SHBFinance) - Recognised for in-house compliance culture plan which integrates targeted training with performance KPIs, active monitoring, and real-world escalation protocols.

Fraud & Financial Crime Industry Collaboration of the Year

• Winner: LexisNexis® Risk Solutions® - Recognised for delivering quantified cross-institution results against money mules and bringing virtual banks into the same intelligence pool as established lenders.

• Highly Commended: The Hong Kong Association of Banks (HKAB) - Commended for ensuring banks and public bodies speak with one voice on fraud education across all 18 districts. [Read more here]

• Highly Commended: The TradeWaltz Inc.-led TBML Working Group - Recognised for uniting Japan's megabanks, technology providers (including NTT DATA), and academia to combat TBML.

Best Cross-Border Initiative Against Fraud and Financial Crime

• Winner: TRM Labs | Beacon Network - Recognised for a real-time network where one verified flag reaches every member at once, replacing slower bilateral request chains between institutions.

Congratulations to all the winners of the Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence 2026.

Regulation Asia would like to offer our sincerest thanks to our judges for their time, dedication, and hard work throughout the judging process. A list of the judges is available on our website.

The winners from previous years can be seen here: 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025