UKFin+ Workshop | 14 October 2025
The UKFin+ Collaborative Workshop on RegTech and Resilience brought together over 40 academics, regulators, and industry professionals to explore how technology and research can play a vital role in addressing the most pressing challenges in financial services.
This workshop is built directly on the UKFin+ Spotlight on RegTech, Resilience, and Compliance, which runs from May to November 2025. The spotlight series examines how financial regulation and technological innovation can evolve together, whilst balancing consumer protection, market stability, and competition with the rapid growth of new financial technologies as well as ongoing changes in regulatory frameworks and legislation. Insights from the earlier roundtable discussions in this series helped shape the design of the workshop, with the breakout room questions drawn from those conversations to ensure continuity and depth of exploration.
Sarah Sinclair (Co-Labs Global) and Professor John Vines (University of Edinburgh) designed and organised the workshop, which combined expert presentations with interactive breakout sessions. Panellists Dr Devraj Basu, Scott Moncur, Annabel Gillard, Jane Jee, and Annabel Nelson shared their insights into three key use cases: AI Governance, Sustainability, and Economic Crime. Each represents a critical area where innovation, collaboration, and regulation must intersect to ensure that RegTech, resilience and compliance play their role effectively in building resilience across the financial system.
Setting the Scene
There was broad agreement that RegTech has the potential to be a cornerstone of how financial services build and maintains trust, compliance, and stability. However, rapid technological change creates new complexities, as well as offering new ways to solve challenges. As regulation struggles to keep pace with innovation, firms face growing costs, fragmented standards, and difficult trade-offs between efficiency, accountability, standards and ethics.
The workshop aimed to identify potential research directions and collaborative pathways that could help bridge these gaps and shape the next phase of UKFin+ research activity. Participants contributed to a series of breakout discussions designed to surface practical, research-led ideas for regulators, academia, and industry.
A consolidated summary of the breakout group discussions, prepared by Co-Labs Global, is available to download here. This document provides a representative overview of the discussions and lists the research topics raised across the three use cases.
Reflections and Emerging Insights
While the above Co-Labs Global document summarises the workshop discussions, here are a few reflections as UKFin+’s perspective on how the insights align with its broader mission to connect research with practice and deliver impact through interdisciplinary collaboration.
The conversations revealed a shared recognition that addressing the challenges of AI Governance, Sustainability, and Economic Crime requires both technological innovation and systemic change. The diversity of perspectives from regulators, academics, technologists, and practitioners helped uncover cross-cutting issues such as:
- The need for secure and interoperable data-sharing frameworks to support financial crime prevention while maintaining privacy and proportionality.
- The importance of proportional regulation to ensure smaller institutions, including credit unions and fintechs, can thrive in the industry as well as adopt RegTech solutions.
- The opportunity to embed sustainability-by-design principles into technology and regulation, ensuring that environmental and ethical considerations underpin innovation.
- The growing urgency to define AI Governance frameworks that balance transparency, fairness, and efficiency, while supporting responsible innovation.
- A collective call for collaboration across academia, regulators, and industry to develop shared standards and learning platforms that strengthen trust and resilience.
Next Steps and Call to Action
The outputs from this workshop will directly inform upcoming UKFin+ research priorities and funding calls, encouraging projects that explore the intersection of regulation, innovation, and resilience.
UKFin+ welcomes continued collaboration with partners across academia, industry, and regulation to develop research that addresses these challenges in practical, measurable ways.
If you would like to discuss any of the workshop themes or explore how they relate to potential research partnerships or funding opportunities, we would be delighted to hear from you.
Watch the panel discussion from the workshop:
