Prof. Thomas Butler

Biography

Tom Butler PhD MSc is Professor of Information Systems and Regulatory Technologies at University College Cork. In this role, his research focuses on the application of artificial intelligence approaches such as knowledge representation, machine learning and natural language processing to address regulatory compliance and risk problems in the financial industry, including operational resilience (including cyber security), data virtualisation, and machine-readable and executable regulations and rules. He has been active in this area since 2012.

Tom’s teaching builds on his applied research and industry experience: He currently lectures on Information Security, Cyber Security, Systems Analysis and Design, and Informatics at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He also delivers seminars on Philosophy and the Scientific Method to PhD candidates.
Tom garnered over €8.5m in research funding in the past 15 years, chiefly as Principal Investigator of Ireland’s Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) Technology Centre (2013-2018). His research on regulatory compliance and operational risk focused on developing AI-based solutions to address GRC and regulatory problems facing the financial industry. There he led a multidisciplinary team of AI knowledge engineers and lawyers (legal-regulatory annotators) across several projects. This research resulted in 12 technology innovations: He subsequently founded a university start-up company called Semantic Rule Ltd. to help commercialise SmaRT, which was pivotal in the success of the Bank of England/FCA Digital Regulatory Reporting Project. Subsequently, he established the GR3C (2018-2022), where two Marie Skłodowska-Curie Career FIT Research Fellows conducted field research on two AI projects in concert with a major financial institution and a RegTech software vendor.

Considered a global thought leader in the field of RegTech, particularly regulatory compliance and risk technologies, he and his team participated in the Bank of England/FCA Digital Regulatory Reporting Project (2017-2019). Following this, he was appointed a member of the Expert Group on Regulatory Obstacles Financial Innovation (ROFIEG) at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union (FISMA) in 2018. There he helped shape current European policy and strategy on digital technologies for financial innovation and RegTech. He was also the only academic member of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) Data Advisory Group in 2020.
In 2021, Tom became a research consultant for a global information technology (IT) services and consulting firm in ICT-enabled integrated risk management and operational resilience.

Currently, he holds membership in the Irish Software Research Centre, Lero, the Enterprise Data Management Council (EDM Council), and the RegTech Council. He also acts in an advisory position for Accenture’s European Integrated Risk Management (IRM) function.

Tom is ranked in the top 2% of scientists by discipline globally, as indicated in research by eminent researchers at Stanford University in 2020.1

Tom has garnered over €8.7m in research funding. He is considered a global thought leader in financial and regulatory technologies (FinTech-RegTech) and technology risk.