As regulatory compliance becomes increasingly complex for financial institutions, RegTech companies are stepping up to provide solutions that streamline processes and leverage advanced technologies. In December 2022, FinTech Global released its annual list of the 100 most innovative RegTech companies (https://fintech.global/regtech100/), highlighting trends such as :

  • Heavy use of artificial intelligence to harvest and interpret data;
  • Easy to implement technology based on SaaS, API’s, and no-code approaches;
  • User-centric solutions with optimized end-user interfaces;
  • Strong focus on AML with more than 60% of the listed fintech’s covering this regulation.

One area where RegTech companies have made a significant impact is in the Know Your Customer (KYC) process. Below we present a subset of the one we think are standing out from the crowd on this specific topic:

  • To help the financial institutions to build and maintain their inventory of Risk as well as to more effectively classify and monitor AML threats, the company Acuminor (https://acuminor.com/) proposes a comprehensive database of threats and risk indicators based on official publications and reports from around the world.

 

  • The KYC review of the Legal entities is one of the most resource-intensive AML tasks. To reduce this resource intensity, Armadillo (https://www.armadillo.co.uk ) and Know Your Customer (https://knowyourcustomer.com/) propose some solutions that include a perpetual KYC approach based on an impressive list of data providers.

 

  • Another challenge in regulatory compliance is the exchange of data between different services or between several implementations of a same financial institution, which must be done while respecting constraints such as the “Chinese wall”, data privacy, and confidentiality. The solution proposed by the companies Duality (https://dualitytech.com) and Enveil (https://www.enveil.com/) represent an efficient approach  to enable an securitized and privacy-protected exchange of information.

 

  • The Covid-19 pandemic has also accelerated the trend towards digital interactions with financial institutions, Electronic Identification (https://www.electronicid.eu) has proposed a technology that allows for fully digital onboarding through a single, end-to-end flow that is compliant across Europe.

 

  • For the financial institutions seeking for ways to improve the AML monitoring on the transfers of money comings from crypto currency trading platform, Elliptic’s solution is worth considering (https://www.elliptic.co/).

 

  • Finally, as AML officers are increasingly dealing with large amounts of data that are more and more difficult to correctly interpret, companies like Lucinity (https://www.lucinity.com/) , quantexa (https://www.quantexa.com/), Ripjar (https://ripjar.com/)have developed innovative approaches for linking and representing data in an intelligible way, enabling compliance officers to spend more time on risk analysis rather than data collection and aggregation.

Overall, we can see that the RegTech companies are helping financial institutions navigate the increasingly complex world of regulatory compliance By streamlining processes and leveraging advanced technologies.

This not only makes it easier for financial institutions to comply with regulations, but it also enables compliance officers to focus more on risk analysis rather than on the collection and aggregation of information.

As the use of RegTech continues to grow, it’s likely that we will see even more innovative solutions emerge in the future. The companies have the potential to greatly benefit financial institutions by reducing the burden of compliance and enabling them to better manage risk.