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Horizon scanning in the legislative and regulatory context refers to proactively monitoring the “regulatory horizon” for early signs of change—whether it’s an opportune change or a potential risk. Rather than waiting for laws to be passed or regulations to take effect, compliance teams cast a forward-looking gaze toward proposed legislation, draft rules, emerging policy trends, and nascent risks. The goal is simple: spot what’s coming before it becomes mandatory, and prepare accordingly. This also means asking the question ‘what should we be tracking that we currently are not?’.
Depending on the industry you’re in, you may or may not have horizon scanning as part of your compliance routine. Operational team leaders, especially in small to mid-sized organizations, are often focused on the current year, while rule-making and rule dissemination for future years are underway. Yet, what’s important to understand is that horizon scanning doesn’t only reveal potential change; it allows us to identify its magnitude in advance. This practice transforms compliance from a reactive fire brigade into a preventative early warning system.
In this blog, we’ll explore what horizon scanning entails, why it’s critical to modern compliance management, the challenges it presents, and how to make it easier.
In the compliance realm, horizon scanning is a systematic process of identifying and analyzing regulatory trends, proposed changes, and emerging requirements before they become law. Think of it as the radar, constantly scanning the distance for any sign of risks or opportunities forming, relevant to your organization. It involves tracking the legislative progression of laws and rules from their earliest stages (consultations, draft legislation, proposed regulations, or draft guidance) through to final enactment. Sometimes, the proposed changes signify not just a minor tweak or a gentle shift but a serious overhaul of operational policies and controls.
The consequences of falling behind are well known: inadequate protocols or missed requirements can lead to inadvertent non-compliance, exposing the organization to hefty fines, legal penalties, reputational damage, inability to operate in certain markets, and so on. By contrast, proactive horizon scanning offers significant benefits, enabling early compliance actions: you can begin drafting adjusted policies, processes, and controls as soon as you know a new law is coming, rather than after it has been enacted.
Just as importantly, being ahead of regulatory change supports strategic decision making at the highest levels. Early insights into upcoming rules inform long-term planning—leadership can make forward-looking decisions, knowing what obligations or constraints are on the horizon. Companies that excel at horizon scanning often gain a competitive advantage: they adapt to new regulations faster than peers, suffer fewer compliance crises, and can even help shape emerging rules by participating in industry consultations or working with regulators.
Not all horizon scanning is the same—organizations typically engage in two complementary modes of scanning to stay ahead of change. One focuses on known obligations (scanning within your existing law library or list of obligations), and the other casts a wider net to discover unknown issues (scanning beyond your current library):
These two types go hand-in-hand. ‘Regulatory change’ horizon scanning keeps your ear to the ground with known obligations, while ‘discovery’ horizon scanning ensures you’re aware of emerging regulations or risks outside your current scope. Together, they provide a 360° view of the regulatory horizon.
There are high-impact use cases where this proactive approach greatly benefits compliance teams and the broader organization:
Beyond preventing negative outcomes, horizon scanning also enables positive strategic benefits. Knowing what’s coming on the regulatory horizon allows leadership to make informed business decisions, preliminary investments, and long-term plans with future rules in mind. Organizations that engage in horizon scanning often gain a competitive advantage, since they can adapt faster to new regulations and face fewer compliance crises. This forward planning might also reveal opportunities—like identifying emerging market trends or technological innovations (AI, blockchain, etc.) that regulators will soon address, giving the company a chance to prepare solutions or advocacy.
Another key use case is improving the efficiency of compliance operations. By having advance notice of regulatory changes, organizations can allocate budget and resources more effectively: scheduling needed training programs, updating IT systems, or hiring subject-matter experts in anticipation of new requirements. This prevents the expensive fire drills that happen when changes catch teams off guard. Over time, a structured horizon scanning program can reduce duplication of effort and ensure everyone is working off the same up-to-date information, enhancing consistency across the organization. The result is a more resilient and agile compliance function that can handle change without disrupting business as usual.
In highly regulated industries, such as healthcare or banking, audits are often treated like a spotlight, with a cascading effect from other agencies, and a poor score can have far-reaching consequences. This is why preparing for audits and regulatory inspections before they happen is critical for operational continuity. Compliance officers identify future high-risk areas or upcoming regulatory priorities early, so they can shore up those areas and educate their teams well in advance of any audit. In essence, scanning the horizon gives you a heads-up to fix issues preemptively and gather documentation or training evidence to satisfy auditors, rather than reacting under pressure.
Let’s take the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) as an example: Adopted in late 2022, DORA introduced sweeping rules for how banks, insurers, and other financial entities manage ICT (information and communications technology) risks with a two-year window to comply. For a bank or insurer that’s been managing ICT risk in a decentralized or ad hoc way, this requires new governance structures, updated vendor contracts, incident-response protocols, reporting processes, and testing regimens—essentially, a full operational resilience program build-out by 2025. Banks and financial firms that practice horizon scanning began tracking DORA as early as the 2020 proposal stage and knew years in advance what was coming. This gave them time to:
By the time DORA’s text was finalized in 2022, these proactive firms already had roadmaps in motion. They could phase in changes gradually, test new processes, and train teams ahead of the January 17, 2025, enforcement date. So, when regulators would ask, “Show us your DORA program,” they’ll have policies, controls, and evidence ready.
While the value of horizon scanning is clear, doing it manually is no small feat. The regulatory environment is vast, fragmented, and constantly shifting. A mid-sized company might need to track dozens of regulatory bodies; a large, multinational organization might be subject to hundreds or even thousands of requirements across various jurisdictions. These rules span everything from financial reporting standards to data privacy and cybersecurity laws, environmental and safety regulations, labor and trade requirements, and more.
Rules are not only numerous; they change frequently and often in nuanced ways. Minor amendments might be buried deep in dense legislative text or published with little fanfare, making them easy to overlook. And, even when you do gather information on upcoming changes, the work isn’t done—you must interpret what those changes mean for your organization. Not every new law or regulation will affect you, and those that do will affect you in different ways.
Finally, you might get hundreds of alerts about proposed legislation each month, but only a small fraction—around 5%—ever becomes law. All of this adds up to a complex, resource-intensive process if attempted manually. No wonder many organizations still struggle: surveys show that traditional approaches like email alerts, spreadsheets, and ad-hoc monitoring leave compliance teams feeling reactive and stretched thin.
By automating the “watch and fetch” aspect of horizon scanning, technology drastically reduces the manual workload and ensures that no important update is missed due to human oversight. Specialized regulatory intelligence solutions like Regology have become invaluable for horizon scanning. Regology automatically scans websites and databases for changes, then consolidates alerts on the platform. Powered by AI, Regology not only retrieves proposed legislation and regulatory updates but also filters and prioritizes them based on relevance to your organization. This saves not just hours but days of work for a compliance team.
We’ll leave you with a quote from Digital Governance Leading and Thriving in a World of Fast-Changing Technologies by Jeremy Green:
“The rise of compliance activity, assurance needs, Three Lines of Defence and benchmarking have undoubtedly combined to create an explosion of reporting data to manage. This has triggered the advent of specific regulatory technology (RegTech…) [...] that is capable of facilitating higher levels of compliance and digital governance at a considerably lower cost. [...]
Regulatory technology pulls together regulations, standards and best practice guidelines to deliver analysis about compliance in formats ultimately usable by governing bodies. At its simplest, it involves the digitisation of manual reporting and compliance processes. At the more complex end, it can be about groups working to define objectives, develop plans and execute actions whilst collecting data and other evidence of attainment.
In our opinion, it won’t be that long before organisations will be criticised if they are not using RegTech to at least a minimum level to manage some or all of these areas.”
If you would like to learn more about how Regology can help your organization with horizon scanning and regulatory change management as a whole, simply reach out to us here for a free consultation.
