RegTech Leadership Forum: Creating pathways to RegTech adoption, for scale and long term sustainability

The RegTech Leadership Forum brought together senior leaders from regulation, financial services, academia, and technology to assess the UK’s readiness for the next phase of RegTech adoption. The discussion reflected the pressures facing the sector: rising regulatory complexity, fragmented global standards, and the increasing role of AI in compliance and risk management.

The RegTech Leadership Forum was designed as a working space rather than a discussion. It brought together leaders from financial services, technology, regulation, and the wider ecosystem to examine why the adoption gap persists, even in environments where capability and goodwill are not in short supply. The conversations that followed were direct, grounded in lived experience, and focused on the system dynamics that shape delivery.

Across every group discussion, the same pattern surfaced. The ambition to adopt RegTech is strong, yet ambition alone cannot overcome misalignment in roles, readiness, funding, and ownership. Expertise exists across the ecosystem, but efforts often run in parallel rather than in partnership. Tools are being built, pilots are being launched, and support organisations are creating infrastructure, yet these pieces rarely connect in a way that delivers outcomes.

A recurring theme was readiness. Innovators continue to invest in security, documentation, and compliance without clear guidance on how those investments will be assessed. Institutions expect maturity, but rarely define what readiness means in practice. The result is cautious progress rather than confident partnership.

People were not the issue. Structure was. Much of the work is carried by capable individuals operating without defined roles, budgets, or formal support. Translational functions, the roles that bridge commercial, technical, and regulatory needs, remain largely invisible in resourcing plans, leaving delivery underpowered and pilots unable to move beyond early stages.

Coordination proved possible, but not automatic. Without a shared operating model that connects demand, support, and delivery, progress is lost to repetition. The system is not broken, but it is disjointed. Ownership of procurement, onboarding, and oversight is often assumed instead of assigned, leaving risk to be carried personally rather than collectively. This lack of clarity slows even the most promising projects.

Scale was another pressure point. Pilots begin without defined end-points. Success measures remain vague. Funding falls away at the moment solutions need to be adopted. What emerged was a clear need to treat scale as a design problem, not an aspiration.

The keynotes reflected these realities. Speakers addressed procurement barriers, trust gaps, limited access for innovators, and the need for clarity, transparency, and shared understanding across institutions. Rather than attributing blame, the contributions revealed a shared truth: systemic challenges require systemic solutions.

The Forum closed with a common recognition. What is needed now is not more experimentation but implementation, supported by trust, defined roles, clear structures, and mechanisms that allow good work to move across institutional boundaries. The conditions for meaningful partnership already exist. What comes next depends on building the systems that allow it to happen by design, not by extra effort.