Fintechs, neobanks, and digital payment need to move fast. After all, product launch delays can mean falling behind in new markets, loss of revenue, and disappointed investors. Among the primary reasons for such delays are regulatory and compliance issues.
These issues often occur because organizations fail to answer fundamental compliance questions at the right time. They kick questions that should have been answered during product planning to launch time. By then, it’s too late. If issues are found, delays are inevitable.
You need to answer the following compliance questions during planning, instead of treating them as post-build afterthoughts:
- Who are the applicable federal, state, or local regulators?
- What are the privacy, KYC, and AML rules you must comply with in each target jurisdiction?
- Which rules in which jurisdictions apply to which products?
- What are regulatory license requirements in each jurisdiction?
- What are your reporting obligations?
Failure to do this is a common error.
It’s a structural problem: most fintechs treat compliance as a gate rather than a layer. They sequence it after the engineering work is finished, hand it to teams who weren’t part of building it and then act surprised when the review process generates as much back-and-forth as the build itself.1
Compliance needs be part of the product architecture from the beginning. To achieve that, organizations need centralized, accurate, comprehensive, national, state, and international regulatory information. You need to know your regulatory obligations up front to build the customer verification, reporting, privacy, security, and audit-readiness systems that compliance demands. When compliance is treated as a just post-build review function, you’re begging for delays because the compliance landscape is extremely complex. A post-hoc review will take a lot of time, and the odds are excellent that it will discover gaps and risks that must be address.
It’s simply impossible to adequately incorporate compliance into product planning with fragmented, manual, spreadsheet-based processes, especially with the overwhelming volume and velocity of regulatory change on the state, national, and international fronts. Commissioning static legal memos for each launch, manually searching regulatory websites, or reusing regulatory interpretations from a previous launch are time-consuming and error prone.
Moving at speed requires compliance that flows outward; not a paint job after the fact. A single, authoritative source of continually updated regulatory information applicable to your business is a must. A comprehensive list of all applicable regulators, jurisdictions, and regulatory obligations under each should be the central font from which organizational compliance flows—and where new product planning begins. Architects and developers can then dip into this font to build compliance into new products from the inside out, instead of building the product and then realizing it fails to meet critical requirements.
AscentAI provides a single source of regulatory truth for your entire enterprise, complete with continual state, federal, and international regulatory monitoring and obligation capture. With it, you’ll have the information you need to build compliance into your products and keep moving at the speed of finance.
HAVE QUESTIONS? Learn more about orchestrating regulatory change throughout your organization with AscentAI.
