Bringing compliance up to speed certainly won’t be easy. The huge compliance infrastructure built up by banks and other FS providers is a testament to this. In particular, the infrastructure for customer identification and anti-money laundering (areas that are particularly relevant to mobile payments) employs thousands of people and costs billions of dollars. To match this, FinTech players have to quickly develop a clear understanding of not only the risks, but also the governance and processes necessary to manage them. It is also clear from the flurry of questions I’m getting from clients in the mobile industry that figuring out how to overcome these hurdles is going be a key source of debate here at the MWC.
RegTech is an opportunity for innovation
Developments in artificial intelligence, blockchain, and other areas of RegTech mean that regulation is also a huge opportunity for innovation. In developing a reliable and cost-efficient compliance infrastructure, newcomers have the advantage of learning from the experiences of incumbent players – few of whom would manage compliance in the way they do now if they could start from scratch. New companies also have the tech talent that is ready and able to develop innovative solutions.
