The 100 most innovative RegTech companies and start-ups

21 November 2017 Consultancy.uk

Emerging ‘RegTech’ technologies, which address the challenges and opportunities of dealing with regulatory issues, are offering financial services institutions growing possibilities to reduce costs and improve the quality of its regulatory response process. The world’s most innovative providers of RegTech solutions have been named in the RegTech 100.

In a similar mould to FinTech, which is short for financial technologies, RegTech (regulatory technology), has grown to become one of the most talked about innovations within the financial services sector. As banks and other financial institutions grapple with the costs and complexities of mission-critical regulatory requirements, RegTech is now regarded as one of the largest and most important sectors within the FinTech space. Particularly as the much heralded GDPR approaches, firms are keener than ever to leverage technological solutions for the huge demands that regulations are likely to place on their operations.

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RegTech companies not only help clients to be compliant with stringent new rules, however. They can also benefit companies in terms of time and resource efficiency and cost-saving, by way of innovations such as automation. RegTech companies offer solutions that address all areas of the compliance process, including on-boarding, monitoring, detection, reporting and process control. They incorporate the latest technologies, such as big data analytics, Blockchain, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, machine learning and natural learning processing.

RegTechs generally work in collaboration with financial institutions and regulatory bodies, utilising low-cost emerging cloud computing and big data for sharing of information. A bank that receives huge amounts of data may find it too complex, expensive, and time consuming to comb through. However, by leveraging automated and predictive analytics, RegTechs can combine the complex information that the bank has with data from previous regulatory failures, in order to both prevent breaches of data law in the present, and predict potential risk areas that the bank should focus on in the future.

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The RegTech 100 list

To celebrate companies and start-ups which are doing the best job in Regtech, FinTech Global, a London based FinTech publication, published the RegTech 100 list of the most innovative in the RegTech space. After a long process, a panel of experts with the Global Fintech Review assessed a group of 416 candidates from across the world and chose the top 100. The selected companies were recognised and commended for their innovative use of technology to generate efficiencies and performance enhancements across the compliance function within financial institutions, which spend tens of billions of dollars on the area each year. The publication also looked at Potential cost savings, efficiency improvement and/or revenue enhancements generated for clients, Impact on the problem being solved and Innovation of technology solution.

An analysis of the top shows that RegTech leadership is closely tied to the most dominant financial markets. Nearly half of the RegTech 100 companies are located in the United Kingdom or the United States. Ireland, Switzerland and Australia, which claim 21 companies between them on the RegTech 100, have already established themselves as RegTech hotspots. Other countries, large and small, are just beginning to make their mark in the industry: Brazil, Bermuda, South Africa, Cyprus, India and the United Arab Emirates are all represented on the list.

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Luxembourg FinTech of the Year 2016 Governance.io, Advanced Logic Analytics – who provide predictive edge analytics augmented with behavioural and emotional analytics – and New York-based RegTek.Solutions are among the winners. They were joined by Californian software company FixNix, Zurich-based IT firm Spitch, and cloud-based VoxSmart, which is headquartered in London.

Also making the grade were firms such as voice processing, compliance and surveillance technology specialists Fonetic, mobile platform Tokken, Blockchain solutions firm Gecko Governance and automated RegTech providers CUBE.