How can RegTech create value for clients and their customers?

February 11, 2020

RegTech is on the rise, but how it creates value is not always clear to people. So a panel at Sthlm Fintech Week tried to answer the question.

During a panel on the future of RegTech on Monday, February 10, hosted by RegTech Analyst’s editor Eric Johansson, the audience asked the panel where they thought RegTech would be able to create value in the years to come.

“I think that there are a lot of areas within the financial services where we have a lot of underserved population,” said Zaliia Gindullina, head of business development at Kidbrooke Advisory, the software venture enabling better decision making in the financial industry. “So for instance, if you go to the financial advice and wealth management, it’s usually the richest that receive high-quality financial advice. And therefore, if you would push a little bit more [you could] raise the margins, cut the costs and serve way more people.”

Åke Freij, head of consulting and calculation services at SPP Konsult, the pension advisory, added that RegTech companies could create value for clients by automating “more mundane process like reporting, regulatory reporting, doing the right report at the right time and less than manual work, but also more efficient processing, having less people doing this manual checks of the kind of thing.”

By doing so, he believed that cutting the time devoted to these processes would empower “sellers can up their game a little bit” and add efficiency to the system.

Åsa Sundqvist, head of business development and partnership at FileChain, the company making decentralised marketplaces and overlay-distributed ledgers a reality, added that value is not just money – it could also be measured in privacy.

“I think a lot of consumers would value their privacy and I think this is even more important when you’re looking to commercial transactions,” she said. “If you’d like to trade and trade, trade secret, whatever, you become more and more interested in that not all transactions end up with consultants doing manual work and looking into what has been done. So there needs to be more systems for doing this. And it means also needs to be integrated in everything. As soon as that will be done, I think the customers will also benefit from lower prices, because it’s very highly expensive, expensive for all the financial institutions to do these regulatory checks.”