Your first scan

This page walks you through the scan wizard end-to-end. The wizard is where you tell Regulatory Snapshot where in the world you care about, what policy areas to monitor, and how far ahead to look. Three answers, one button. Everything else has a sensible default; you can stay on the surface or open the Advanced drawer if you want to tune the research engine or change the model behind the scenes.

If you’d rather start with the conceptual picture — what a scan is, and what comes out the other end — read What is a snapshot? first. This page is the practical walk-through.

We will walk through it with a concrete scenario throughout: you work at a UK asset manager and want to track AML / KYC and sustainable-finance changes across the UK, the EU, and Switzerland over the next 12 months. Whenever this page says “for our example”, that is what we mean.

Why this matters

The scan wizard is the only place where you actively shape what the scan produces. Everything else — the heatmap colours, which items make it into the briefing, what shows up on the timeline — is downstream of three choices: jurisdictions, areas, horizon. Spending two minutes setting it up well makes the difference between a briefing you’d send to your CCO and a briefing you’d quietly delete.

Signing in

Regulatory Snapshot uses Clerk for sign-in. The first time you visit, you will see a landing screen with Sign in and Register buttons. The sign-up flow is the standard email + password (with optional verification) and once you are signed in, the dashboard becomes interactive. You are signed in across devices automatically; your language preference and a few other personal settings travel with your account.

[!NOTE] If your organisation has Single Sign-On configured, the Sign in button will route through it directly — no separate password to remember.

Opening the wizard

From the dashboard, look for the New scan entry point in the dashboard chrome. The wizard opens as a tab inside the dashboard — your other tabs, the header, and your account button stay where they are. If you are landing fresh on an account with no scans yet, the empty-state call-to-action also takes you here.

The wizard is a single page with two columns: a scrolling form on the left, where you make your selections, and a sticky summary rail on the right that previews your scan as you build it — jurisdictions chosen, areas chosen, horizon picked, estimated cost — and houses the run button. The run button stays disabled until you have at least one jurisdiction, at least one area, and a horizon picked.

The three steps

Step 1 — Jurisdictions (“Where?”)

The first step picks up two things at once: a hint about the kind of entity you work for (asset manager, bank, payments firm, and similar) and the jurisdictions you want to scan. The entity hint isn’t a hard filter — it just helps the analysis weight what counts as “high impact” for your kind of business. MiFID II rules matter to an asset manager but are noise to a payments fintech.

For jurisdictions, you have three ways to pick:

• Region presets — one-click bundles like G7, EMEA, APAC, Americas, EU+, Global Major. Clicking a preset toggles all jurisdictions in that bundle at once.
• Individual jurisdictions — pills for the defaults (US, EU, UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Brazil, India). Each is toggleable.
• Custom jurisdictions — if you operate somewhere not in the default list (South Africa, UAE, ASEAN, Mexico, Cayman Islands), type it into the Add custom field. Custom entries are visually distinguished so you can see at a glance which parts of your scan are off the beaten path.

A small world map sits below the pills as a visual reference for which jurisdictions you’ve selected.

For our example, you click the EU+ preset. Three pills light up: UK, EU, Switzerland. Done.

Step 2 — Regulatory areas (“What?”)

The default ten areas cover the bulk of financial-services horizon scanning: Banking / Prudential, Capital Markets, Digital Assets / Crypto, AML / KYC, Payments, Data Privacy, Operational Resilience, ESG / Sustainable Finance, Sanctions, Research Bundling / Unbundling.

Pick whichever apply. If you need something narrower — a specific regime, a workstream name your team uses, a thematic angle like Pay-to-Play or Retail Distribution — type it into the Custom area field. Custom areas are visually distinguished and the analyst treats them as a first-class category. See Jurisdictions and topics for guidance on when to use a built-in area vs a custom one.

For our example, you tick AML / KYC and ESG / Sustainable Finance.

Step 3 — Time horizon (“When?”)

A row of six segmented buttons: 3, 6, 12, 18, 24, 36 months. The horizon controls how far ahead the scan looks — anything expected to happen (proposed, in consultation, finalised, or already in implementation phase) inside that window is in scope.

Sensible defaults:

• 6 months — operational cadence; what is hitting in the current half.
• 12 months — the most common choice; covers a normal compliance planning cycle.
• 18–24 months — strategic view; useful for board papers and roadmap work.
• 36 months — long-range; mostly catches multi-year EU regimes and slow-moving global standards.

For our example, you pick 12 months.

You have now satisfied the three required inputs. The summary rail on the right shows your full configuration and the run button is no longer greyed out.

(Optional) Advanced

Below the three core steps is a collapsible Advanced drawer. You do not have to open it; the defaults are tuned for “good briefing, reasonable cost, sensible runtime”. But if you are curious, this is where you can:

• Pick a different research engine or model variant. Snapshot offers more than one research pipeline; each has slightly different cost, speed, and coverage characteristics. The default is the one we recommend for most scans.
• Tune the specific AI models used at each stage of the pipeline.
• Enable translation of the finished briefing into one or more target languages.

Each option has a short description; nothing has hidden side effects. If you change your mind, you can collapse the drawer with the Collapse button.

[!WARNING] Costs scale with engine and model choice and with the size of your scan. The summary rail’s estimate updates as you change settings — keep an eye on it before you run, especially if you are adding many jurisdictions or selecting higher-quality model tiers.

Pressing the run button

The run button submits your configuration to the research backend and immediately returns you to the dashboard. The scan runs non-blocking — you stay on whatever tab you were on; you can browse old snapshots, edit a schedule, or step away from the screen entirely. A small scan toast appears in a corner of the dashboard showing live progress.

The toast steps through the pipeline:

1.  Initialising…
2.  Researching the regulatory landscape…
3.  Synthesising the findings…
4.  Editing for clarity…
5.  Translating  (only if translation enabled)
6.  Scan complete

A typical scan with 3–5 jurisdictions and 2–4 areas takes between 90 seconds and four minutes. Wider scans take longer.

[!NOTE] You can run more than one scan at the same time. Each gets its own toast; cancel any of them with the cancel button on the toast, or dismiss a finished one once you have opened the result.

What lands on the dashboard

When the scan completes, the snapshot is saved to your account and appears at the top of My Snapshots. The toast offers a View button — click it to load the snapshot into the dashboard. Snapshot deliberately does not auto-replace your current view, so if you were halfway through reading something else when it finished, your place is kept.

Once you click View, the dashboard refreshes with your data:

• Overview (heatmap) — every regulatory item plotted by likelihood × impact, coloured from green through gold to red.
• Briefing — an editorial executive narrative that opens with Bottom Line Up Front, names the top priorities, and closes with Trend Analysis, Key Deadlines, and a Watch List.
• Trends — cross-cutting themes the analysis surfaced (convergence, divergence, acceleration patterns).
• Timeline — items pinned to their expected effective date.
• Sources — every URL the research pulled.

For our UK-asset-manager example, you might see the FCA’s Sustainability Disclosure Requirements in green (“Final Rule”), the EU’s CSRD reporting waves in amber (“Implementation Phase”), and FINMA’s revised AML circular in green (“Effective”). Click any item to open a detail panel with the full summary, the regulator, the expected date, and a View source link.

From here, head to Studio to turn the scan into a tearsheet, infographic, or audio briefing — see Studio.

A common-pitfall checklist

[!WARNING] A few first-scan mistakes worth avoiding:

• Ticking everything. Thirteen jurisdictions × ten areas × 36 months is technically possible but dilutes the editorial quality of the briefing. The analyst is at its best when scope is curated. Two to five jurisdictions, two to four areas, 12 months — start there.
• Picking a horizon shorter than your topic. A 3-month horizon on slow-moving topics like Basel finalisation will return very little. Match the horizon to the cadence of the regime you care about.
• Closing the tab while a scan runs. You don’t need to. Scans run in the background; the toast will be there when you come back. But the toast only persists in this browser tab — if you fully sign out and back in, the running scan is still going on the server; just look for the result under My Snapshots.

Beyond the basics

A non-obvious lever once you have a configuration you trust: the wizard remembers your last selections, and Re-scan on any My Snapshots card pre-fills the wizard with the exact configuration of that scan. Two practical patterns fall out of this:

• Branch a “what if?” Open a successful scan, hit Re-scan, change one knob (push the horizon out, add a jurisdiction, swap a custom area), run. You now have a paired before/after — the original scan and the variant — to compare side by side.
• Promote a one-off scan into a recurring one. Once a configuration produces a briefing you’d happily read every week, lift it into Scheduled Scans so you stop having to remember to run it.

Where to go next

• Jurisdictions and topics — picking scope well by role.
• Reading the dashboard — heatmap, timeline, trends, detail panel, briefing.
• Studio — exports: tearsheets, infographics, audio briefings, decks.
• FAQ — common questions.