The REGTECH Book

Emerging Innovations in RegTech

By Stephen Ufford

CEO, Trulioo

Historically, most doomsday scenarios tend to remain scenarios – reality tends to play out a little differently. In 2008, however, doomsday advocates were nearly proven right. A global economic meltdown was only hours away before unprecedented intervention by the US Treasury. When the dust finally settled, policy makers knew they had to tighten restrictions on financial institutions (FIs). Since then, new laws have been put into place, more than $235 billion in fines have been levied, and rigorous compliance rules have gone into effect; alongside, the technological capabilities have evolved, enabling us to improve the breadth and depth of data reporting, aggregation, and analysis.

Emerging from the ashes of the 2008 global financial crisis, new regulatory technologies (RegTech) are helping to ease the burden of compliance and lower operational costs and risks for FIs – fundamentally changing the nature of the financial services industry. At the crux of these changes is the use of new technologies such as compliance as a service (CaaS), to help FIs regulate, monitor, report, and comply.

Manual and cumbersome compliance processes present major problems in our digital, on-demand economy, where the financial industry is inundated with complex and ever-changing regulations. The saying, “we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom”, rings true more than ever before, especially as FIs crunch through voluminous ...