Effective RegTech is about data not technology 

It is not surprising that RegTech attracted so much money and so many entrepreneurs as the Fintech start-up boom took off from 2012. Banks, asset managers and insurers were hit by successive waves of regulation in the long aftermath of the great financial crisis of 2007-08, and automation of transaction monitoring and reporting, KYC, AML, CFT and sanctions screening checks, data protection, mis-selling risk, cyber-security and even operational resilience was an easy sell. A future in which regulators were just another node on a blockchain network which hosted everything they needed to know seems more distant today than it did in 2017-18, and the RegTech sector is now consolidating. But as Rupert Brown, CTO at regulatory advisers Evidology tells Dominic Hobson, the hard work of mapping and then standardising regulatory events and data flows is now beginning.