Scotland has a vibrant regtech community within its fast-growing fintech cluster. Regulatory reform across industries presents a fantastic opportunity for finding new ways to innovate products. And that's where Scotland’s fintech and regtech communities come together.
Nicola Anderson, chief executive of FinTech Scotland says: "If you’re a large global bank or financial institution, you’ve seen approximately 1,600 new global regulatory obligations come into play over the last year. That was regulators across the world reacting to Covid-19 and trying to help the industry address any immediate changes needed to support the economy, consumers, customers and businesses.
"At the other end of the scale, if you’re a small business or sole trader, you’re probably still spending up to 20% of your time meeting regulatory compliance obligations.
UK and global trends
"Anything that regtech can touch now around managing financial crime globally is useful," Nicola adds. "It gives us the opportunity to advance some very good solutions against tricky issues in that space – and we’re already seeing that happen. Technology can help us protect people against individual frauds, as well as boosting confidence in the financial system.
"How we share data across borders is another area where regtech can help. With growing volumes of data and technology moving around the world, we’ll start to see more of that."
Businesses in Scotland who have applied their regulatory and technology capabilities into financial services are also finding ways to apply innovative solutions into other heavily regulated industries, such as energy, health tech, space and more.
It’s an opportunity that’s really coming to life in Scotland – and an opportunity for your business to reach out to Scotland’s regtech community for the right solutions to support customer onboarding and regulatory needs.
Scottish regtech companies to watch
A fantastic example of an innovative fintech and regtech business based in Glasgow, driving change in reporting and regulatory obligations.
This Edinburgh-based firm has developed a cloud-based software tool that applies machine learning to improve the efficiency and quality of regulatory reporting solutions.
Open banking has become a real game changer for the industry. As a small Scottish fintech startup, The ID Co has helped create the massive tidal wave of change that’s revolutionising the banking sector. The ID Co provides online identity verification, proofing and strong authentication service that enables people and businesses to transact in digital environments.
Its consumer product, DirectID (originally miiCard), offers individuals a secure, easy and effective way to prove who they are online. The company is now ready to expand its business with banks and customers in every part of the world.
Encompass uses intelligent process automation and artificial intelligence to gather and analyse data to dynamically build a visual picture of a company or individual in just minutes.
Dataflow is the lifeblood of the modern world. It is as critical to everyday life as the flow of water, energy, and transport. Obashi is driving changes in data management and helping businesses see data flow. The OBASHI platform helps non-technical and technical people communicate through using easy-to-understand diagrams.
Obashi has become the first Scottish company to join the World Economic Forum’s Global Innovators Community and its Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Based in Edinburgh, PRIMED’s software automates the process of collecting and connecting information through mapping and intuitive dashboards. It helps clients to deliver governance and reporting for business: regulation, policy, strategy, change, financial stress testing, performance and oversight.
An Edinburgh-based provider of market leading identity and access management software, specialising in delivering intelligence in the authorisation process across a range of different industries.
Based at the Bayes Centre opens in a new window in Edinburgh, Trace brings together decades of deep experience in privacy, tech, data strategy, data ethics and digital transformation. It provides its clients with innovative, user-friendly and visual data protection compliance software, expert privacy consultancy and online training.
Software security innovators, Verimatrix protects digital content, applications, and devices with intuitive, people-centred and frictionless security. Leading brands turn to Verimatrix to secure everything from premium movies and live streaming sports to sensitive financial and healthcare data, to mission-critical mobile applications.
Verimatrix’s team in Glasgow develop app shielding technology. This is used by financial organisations globally – from the largest to early-stage startups – to protect their mobile apps from reverse engineering and malicious attacks. This in turn protects their wider ecosystem and safeguards their business.
Edinburgh regtech, Visible Capital uses open banking technology to automate the customer onboarding process, ensure regulatory compliance and transform fact-find operations from a paper gathering exercise to an immediate, data-rich digital download.
We’d like to use cookies to enable functionality, to understand how you use our site, to support our marketing activities, and to help us improve the site.
Our operations are managed by Scottish Enterprise.
Cookies help Scottish Enterprise (“SE”, “us” or “we”) to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allow us to improve our website. We assume that you are happy to receive all the cookies in the categories that you elect to allow, or which are strictly necessary for the operation of our website. You can change your cookie settings at any time.
Strictly necessary cookies
These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our website.
Cookie name
Purpose
Expiry
SESDI_Necessary_AllowedCookies
This cookie is used to record your preferences in regard to accepting marketing, performance or functionality cookies across the site.
1 year
se-session
This cookie is used to provide secure access to SE website features such as address lookup and form validation/submissions.
When browser is closed
Performance and analytics cookies
They allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.
Third party service
Purpose
Where to find out more
Google Analytics
Google Analytics helps us analyse the behaviour of users on our site, such as which pages they view, how long they spend on each page, and which elements they interact with.
Hotjar helps us analyse the behaviour of users on our site by collating data into heatmaps, scrollmaps and other visual representations. It also allows us to add short surveys to the site.
These cookies record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our website and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose.
Third party service
Purpose
Where to find out more
Google Ads
Google Ads help us to show pay per click ads in Google search results. These cookies help us track who comes to our site through these ads, so we know how successful they are.
The LinkedIn Insight Tag helps us analyse the behaviour of visitors to our site who have come through LinkedIn adverts, and also helps us target advertising on LinkedIn.
SE sometimes embeds photos and video content from websites such as YouTube and Flickr. As a result, when you visit a page with content embedded from, for example, YouTube or Flickr, you may be presented with cookies from these websites. SE does not control the dissemination of these cookies. You should check the relevant third party website for more information about these.
SE will not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information about you. However, if you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by SE websites, or any third party websites, you can do this through your browser settings. The Help function within your browser should tell you how.
Alternatively, you may wish to visit the About Cookies website, which contains comprehensive information about cookies and how to restrict or delete cookies on a wide variety of browsers.
Please be aware that restricting cookies may impact on the functionality of the SDI website.
SE and our other websites use a number of suppliers who set cookies on our behalf in order to deliver the services that they are providing. We are constantly reviewing our use of cookies and, as such, this cookies policy will be regularly renewed to include up to date information about the cookies used by our suppliers. We would highly recommend that you check this page on a regular basis.
