The REGTECH Book

Rise of RegTech in the German Market

By Dr Matthias Lange¹, Selcuk Kuram² and Christina Fellner³

¹Managing Partner FinLeap

²Consultant, Berlin Hyp AG

³Head of Unit B2C, Fidor Bank AG

Let the numbers speak for themselves: according to the Financial Times, the big banks spend well above US$1 billion per annum on meeting compliance regulations. The annual volume of regulation went up by 492% from 2008 to 2015 according to Thomson Reuters. Recent estimates suggest that more than 300 million pages of additional regulatory documents will be published by 2020.

The financial services industry increasingly complains about the amount and intensity of rules to be adhered to, mostly because financial institutions’ information technology (IT) infrastructures are often not yet capable of implementing the demands into their legacy infrastructures. IT systems are old-fashioned and silo-based, which leads to inefficient, slow, and cost-intensive work-arounds – often dependent on manual inputs. This will result in even more complex, opaque, and inflexible IT environments in the future, and market players realize more and more that this will become an additional problem – one that’s negatively impacting and decelerating the needed innovation cycles.

So financial institutions, as well as the regulators themselves, started to search for ways to implement processes more efficiently by applying new technological solutions. In parallel, the FinTech area evolved with new, innovative business models, ...