Trends
The Trends tab is the scan’s pattern ledger: the movements it identified that span more than one jurisdiction or regime. Where the Overview tells you what is happening item by item, Trends tells you what the items add up to — convergence here, divergence there, a regime interlocking with another.
It is written for the “so what” conversation: when someone asks not what did the FCA publish but where is this all going, this is the tab you open.
The layout is a numbered editorial ledger down the left and a rail on the right holding the pattern-type legend. The standfirst states the scope plainly: “Three patterns from the loaded scan — Crypto-assets across the EU and UK.”
The five pattern types
Every trend carries exactly one type, assigned by the scan. The legend in the rail defines them:
| Type | Reading |
|---|---|
| Convergence | Jurisdictions moving towards a shared approach |
| Acceleration | The pace of regulatory change is increasing |
| Interconnected | Obligations that interlock across regimes |
| Divergence | Jurisdictions splitting on approach |
| Emerging | A new pattern forming — early signals only |
Each type has its own line-glyph (converging lines, diverging lines, a dashed rising line for emerging, and so on) — the glyph is an encoding, so a colour-blind reader gets the same information. The legend also counts each type’s occurrences in the loaded scan, including 00 for types that did not appear.
As the legend’s foot note says: types are assigned by the scan — not user-editable. The legend is a key, not a filter.
Reading a trend entry
Each entry in the ledger carries:
- A running number (
TREND 01) and the type chip. - The title — the pattern’s theme.
- Jurisdiction chips — but only when they differentiate. If every trend in the scan covers the same set of jurisdictions, the chips are suppressed as redundant; they return the moment the sets differ.
- The description — the argued paragraph.
- Leader: — which jurisdiction is setting the pace, when the scan named one.
- Related — tags naming the scan items that evidence the pattern, or
NONE RECORDED IN THIS SCANwhen the pattern rests on the narrative alone.
Worked example: reading a convergence
Your scan of Payments across the EU, UK and Singapore shows:
TREND 02 · Convergence — Operational-incident reporting converges on 24-hour notification EU · UK · SG Description: all three regulators moved towards a 24-hour initial-notification window this quarter… Leader: EU Related: DORA incident-reporting RTS · FCA operational-incidents CP · MAS notice revision
Read it in three steps. The type says shared approach forming; the leader says the EU text is the template the others are tracking; the related tags name the three items to open (via the Overview or Timeline) if you need dates and sources. If your firm operates in only one of the three, the leader is still the jurisdiction to read first — that is where the eventual shape of your own regime is being drafted.
The trend ledger is editorial output written at scan time. The filter chips in the toolbar do not narrow it — toggling Likelihood or Impact changes the Overview and Timeline, not this ledger. Equally, there is no click-through from a trend to an item detail; use the Related tags as your index into the other tabs.
When the ledger is empty
A scan that found no cross-jurisdiction movement says so: “No cross-jurisdiction patterns detected — patterns appear when the scan identifies movement that spans two or more jurisdictions or regimes.” This is common for single-jurisdiction scans, where by construction nothing can converge or diverge. If patterns matter to you, scope your scan across at least two jurisdictions — see Your first scan.
A non-obvious tip
Read the legend’s zero rows, not just the populated ones. A quarter of Convergence 03 · Divergence 00 followed by a quarter of Divergence 02 is a regime starting to fracture — visible in the counts before any single item makes it obvious. Comparing legends across a snapshot series is the cheapest trend-of-trends analysis available.