Founded in 1991, India-headquartered HCL Technologies is a global technology company that helps enterprises reimagine their businesses for the digital age. The company specializes in key areas, including digital, IoT, cloud, automation, cybersecurity, and analytics, amongst others. With the company increasingly having a presence in the RegTech space, how does it see the sector changing? How is RegTech changing compliance? According to Daryl Wilkinson – Senior Executive, Strategic Initiatives, Financial Services UK&I at HCL Technologies, "I think you can look at this through two lenses. First, there appears to be a consensus that the global RegTech market is expected to achieve $30bn by 2027 – so that alone is changing the compliance market –new investment is disrupting incumbent models and is changing the way regulators engage with businesses. The second lens is cost; financial services rely heavily on legacy technology – RegTech's nature is to find that niche to solve those problems at a much lower cost than the banks and insurers might otherwise do themselves."

Amid an increasingly regulated global business landscape, many financial institutions (FIs) are turning to regulatory technologies (RegTech) to help them cope with greater scrutiny and the potential for hefty fines for non-compliance. As a result of the uptake, RegTech – which according to Harvard Kennedy School is the "application of new technology to regulation-related activities in order to shift them from analog-era to digital and computational models and, thereby, gain dramatic increases in effectiveness, efficiency and scalability" – has risen to a position of relative prominence. Many FIs are utilising the technology to automate compliance tasks and reduce operational risks. The demand for RegTech products – be it machine learning, biometrics, cloud computing, blockchain or distributed ledgers – is particularly timely, with the implementation dates of new and complex regulations, such as the updated Payment Services Directive (PSD2), the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) and the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDFS) Part 504, on the horizon. Yet despite its burgeoning status as a go-to regulatory compliance option, issues do exist with the adoption and implementation of RegTech.