Research Challenges:

RegTech, Resilience and Compliance Roundtable

Roundtable Discussions

As part of the Spotlight on RegTech Resilience and Compliance, UKFin+ hosted a roundtable event in Glasgow on 16 July 2025. This event brought together leading voices from industry, academia, and government to address some of the most persistent and complex challenges facing financial services.

The event created a space for attendees to engage in two rounds of themed roundtable discussions. These focused on identifying opportunities for collaboration and surfacing real-world challenges across the financial services landscape.

We’re delighted to share the outcomes of these roundtable discussions and hope the insights will spark new ideas across our network, helping bring to life the concepts initiated in Glasgow through funded research projects.

Sustainable RegTech Infrastructure

AI’s environmental impact may endanger the resilience and continued societal acceptance of AI in financial services.

Possible Research:

  • Model energy and water usage of RegTech systems
  • Design eco-efficient AI models for compliance
  • Explore batch vs real-time compliance architectures

Privacy-Preserving Compliance Solutions

Privacy is desirable, as well as legally required (GDPR etc.).

Possible Research:

  • Use zero-knowledge proofs for private regulation
  • Secure cross-border data collaboration
  • Automate compliance assertions without exposing data

Trustworthy AI in RegTech

AI can help in RegTech solutions, but various challenges may exist in the use of AI, specifically for RegTech.

Possible Research:

  • Explainable AI for risk scoring and supervision
  • Robustness against adversarial manipulation
  • Boundaries for agentic AI in compliance contexts
  • Human-centred design and behavioural interventions
UKFin+ Director Professor Karen Elliott

Provenance, Auditability & Digital Trust

Can we automate and digitize using blockchain and related technologies?

Possible Research:

  • Use blockchain for traceable compliance records
  • Integrate IoT/satellite data for ESG monitoring
  • Standardize RegTech-linked digital assets (eg tokenised carbon credits)
  • Identity systems, fraud detection and other trust-enablers

Formal Modelling for Regulation Encoding

Financial services need to fulfil regulatory requirements, which often can to be expressed in logic.

Possible Research:

  • Formal methods to encode regulation logic
  • Constraint solvers for compliance testing
  • Simulate systemic impact of regulatory rules

Scalable & Inclusive RegTech Systems

Can we share solutions and learn from each other, especially for SMEs and newcomers?

Possible Research:

  • Open-source, modular architectures
  • Seamless integration of emerging services incl. agentic AI
  • Accessible tooling for SMEs
  • Gap mapping across the ecosystem
  • Global convergence of systems and approaches
  • Address literacy of staff, SMEs, FS industry