Project Background

For many financial authorities, regulatory guidelines are issued in static PDF documents. As financial systems grow more complex and digital, this approach has become increasingly difficult for supervisors to maintain, and update, and for regulated financial firms to navigate and operationalize. The Bank of Mauritius (BoM) regulates a wide variety of entities, including banks, payment service providers, and FX dealers. BoM’s implementation of a risk-based supervisory framework emphasized significant challenges with this manual approach, particularly as both structured and unstructured information requirements increased. As supervisory expectations become more granular and data-intensive, the reliance on static PDFs strains supervisory capacity, slows updates, and makes it harder to ensure consistency and accuracy across regulatory guidance and supervisory assessments.

Currently BoM’s guidelines are in a PDF format, resulting in a bulky manual management process. To update guidelines and rules, BoM accesses a word document copy of the existing guideline, applies the changes and then publishes it on the website as a pdf. This manual process is time-consuming and impacts accuracy, creating a "compliance cost" for both the regulator and the firms it supervises.

To address these hurdles, BoM’s Innov8 team launched a Proof of Concept (PoC) to explore the feasibility of "Rules as Code" or converting regulatory requirements into machine-readable formats to streamline supervision and compliance.

Urvashi Soobarah, Director of Supervision at the Bank of Mauritius, explains “A key element of our suptech strategy involves migrating from static PDF‑based regulations to structured, machine‑readable rules. This transformation will facilitate the integration of AI/ML‑tools into our supervisory toolkit. Our regulatees may in turn leverage on regtech solutions for compliance management.”

Project Objectives

Through the Public-Private Secondments for SupTech Innovation initiative, a seconded expert from TSO, a UK-based provider of regulatory technology, collaborated with BoM. The project objective was to deliver a Proof of Concept that demonstrates feasibility and outlines the vision and implementation steps for a working prototype capable of:

• Automatically converting existing BoM PDF content into machine-readable JSON format.
• Managing regulatory content within a dedicated content management system (CMS) to allow for easier editing and version control.
• Demonstrating interoperability by showing how third-party regtech providers could ingest regulatory content directly from the Bank via API.
• Enhancing transparency by providing the same content in multiple formats (HTML, JSON, and PDF) from a single source.

A helpful analogy to solidify understanding would be to think of this project as moving from a printed encyclopedia to Wikipedia with an API. Instead of supervisors and banks manually flipping through static pages (PDFs) and re-typing information, they now have a dynamic, living database. Regulatory changes are made once and instantly reflected across all official publication formats, ensuring consistent interpretation by supervisors, regulated entities, and automated compliance tools.

Solution Overview

The solution outlined in TSO’s PoC was a SaaS-style, web-based platform designed to ingest, transform, and publish regulatory content.

1. Content Ingestion & Transformation

• The proposed system would allow users to upload PDF guidelines and specify where the main content starts, ensuring the pipeline ignores cover pages or preambles.
• A custom API would transform the PDF into a tree-hierarchy JSON schema that maps the document down to the paragraph level, complete with unique IDs for tracking and citation.

2. Editorial Management via Drupal

• The solution would utilize a Drupal CMS hosted on AWS, providing an intuitive "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) interface for supervisors to make editorial amendments.
• When a section is edited, the system would track revisions and allow supervisors to preview changes immediately across all output formats.

3. Multimodal Output

• From a single editorial source, the system would be able to generate a user-focused website (HTML), a machine-readable file (JSON), and a formatted publication (PDF).
• This ensures that both human readers and automated compliance systems are working from the exact same authoritative data.

Technology Stack

Scalability Potential

The diagram below indicates the future development pathways. The PoC illustrates the type of capability required to progress from basic e-governance, through advanced e-governance and into digital first governance (column 1 to column 3).

Impact and Lessons Learned

The PoC successfully demonstrates that digitizing regulations can significantly reshape the supervisory landscape. Key impacts identified include:

• Operational Efficiency: Automated updates allow for faster revision cycles compared to manual Word-to-PDF workflows.
• Reduced Compliance Costs: By sharing guidelines via API, firms can ingest rules directly into their internal systems, reducing the "compliance burden."
• Capacity Building: The digitized format paves the way for internal tools like AI chatbots, which supervisors can use to query regulations or compare them against bank-submitted policy documents.
• Leapfrogging Development: Urvashi Soobarah emphasized the value of the collaboration, stating, "We really believe that with the assistance through this secondment, we are actually able to leapfrog in this development.”

Alan Blanchard, TSO Business Development Director shared “We were delighted to support the Bank of Mauritius Innov8 team in exploring how machine-readable regulation can improve interoperability, accuracy and usability for both regulators and firms. This proof of concept shows how converting unstructured regulatory content into structured, machine-readable formats can remove friction from regulatory change, improve access to authoritative information and ultimately support a more future-ready financial ecosystem.”

Next Steps: Toward "Digital-First" Governance

Following the successful PoC, the Bank of Mauritius is pursuing a phased roadmap to move from manual, document-based processes toward digital-first regulatory governance. The next phase focuses on implementing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that builds directly on the PoC by operationalising the platform for use by BoM policy and supervisory teams.

The MVP will involve setting up a secure, cloud-hosted (AWS) environment that BoM staff can access directly, alongside expanded editorial tools, version control and limited workflow functionality. This will allow supervisors to actively create, amend and publish machine-readable regulatory content, while testing interoperability through APIs and assessing how the system supports both suptech and regtech use cases in day-to-day supervision.

In parallel, the MVP will serve as a live testing environment for governance, operational processes and internal capability building, enabling the Bank to evaluate performance, usability and organisational readiness. Insights from this phase will inform decisions on scaling to a full production system, including more advanced workflow automation, broader content coverage and the future integration of AI-enabled supervisory tools.

About the Project Partners

TSO

TSO (The Stationery Office) is a leading RegTech provider specialized in turning authoritative information into useful, structured data formats.

• Alan Blanchard – Business Development Director
• Paul Mansfield – Solution Architect

Bank of Mauritius

The BoM’s Innov8 team and Supervision Department led the coordination, ensuring the envisioned tool aligns with the bank’s digital transformation goals and its commitment to fostering financial innovation.

• Urvashi Soobarah – Director of Supervision
• Ranjeet Kallychurn – Senior Analyst
• Vishnu Nursoo – Bank Officer, Supervision - Licensing & Regulatory Policy Unit
• Prista Aumeer – Business Intelligence Developer

Public-Private Secondments for SupTech Innovation

Co-led by the World Economic Forum and the Cambridge SupTech Lab, this initiative connects technical experts from the private sector with financial authorities through short-term secondments. The goal is to accelerate innovation in supervision and regulation by solving practical challenges with cutting-edge technology.