RegTech

RegTech, short for regulatory technology, is software that helps regulated firms meet their obligations more efficiently than manual processes can. The FCA, which issued a call for input on RegTech in 2015 and a feedback statement (FS16/4) in 2016, defines it on its RegTech page as "new technologies developed to help overcome regulatory challenges in financial services." The label has since spread well beyond financial services.

The category covers several distinct jobs, and buyers should keep them apart:

• Regulatory change and intelligence: monitoring regulators, horizon scanning, and turning changes into owned obligations.
• Regulatory reporting: producing and submitting returns to supervisors.
• Financial crime: identity checks, sanctions screening and transaction monitoring.
• Risk and controls: governance, risk and compliance (GRC) platforms that hold risks, controls and evidence.

Its counterpart on the other side of the table is SupTech, the supervisory technology that authorities use to collect and analyze data.

The regulatory change segment has consolidated quickly. CUBE completed its purchase of Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence on 31 December 2024, Archer announced its acquisition of Compliance.ai in February 2024, and Bloomberg Industry Group announced its acquisition of Regology in June 2026. Who owns a tool is now a selection criterion, and the 2026 comparison of horizon scanning tools tracks it.

The newest wave applies language models to reading and triaging regulatory text; see agentic AI in compliance. Any RegTech product should pass the test a supervisor applies to a manual process: whether you can show what it did, when, and why.