UKFin+ Spotlight

RegTech, Resilience and Compliance May – November 2025

Our upcoming spotlight focuses on RegTech, Resilience and Compliance, running from May to November 2025.

The financial services sector is subject to rigorous regulatory oversight, and the UK is no exception. A complex framework of existing and emerging legislation governs the industry, overseen by key regulators such as the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Payment Services Regulator. These bodies are tasked with preventing serious harm, particularly to consumers, raising industry standards, ensuring the stability of financial markets, and promoting healthy competition and innovation.

The rapid emergence of innovative financial technologies presents a unique challenge to regulators, who must strike a careful balance between protecting stakeholders and enabling innovation. Cryptoassets are a notable example of this tension. Design choices around anonymity, privacy, and security in cryptoasset systems often conflict with current and forthcoming regulatory requirements.

Ideally, the development of new financial products or features should proactively consider the relevant stakeholders and regulatory implications. Research tools should be developed to be used in the development process to help identify stakeholder groups, understand their objectives, and assess potential vulnerabilities. Compliance assessment remains a resource-intensive task for many organisations. There is significant potential for research to support the creation of intelligent tools, such as those powered by large language models, that can translate regulatory texts into actionable code or automatically generate compliance checklists. For new technologies, metrics could be developed to understand to what extent the new technology already complies with existing laws.

Throughout this spotlight, UKFin+ will host a series of events, including roundtable discussions, to bring together academics, industry leaders, and regulators. These forums aim to generate actionable insights and develop practical tools to address the challenges and opportunities in RegTech, resilience, and compliance.

During this period, while our funding remains open to all applications, we will prioritise fostering connections and supporting collaborations that work with RegTech, Resilience and Compliance.

Read more about research opportunities RegTech in our research agenda.