Top 5 RegTech companies trending in the European market

By Megha Bhattacharya

RegTech is the management of regulatory processes within the financial industry through technology. The main functions of RegTech include regulatory monitoring, reporting, and compliance.

Europe is home to about 140 regtech startups- 30% of those startups specialize in compliance management, 27% focus on know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) automation, and 26% leverage technology and data to provide risk management tools, according to a data provided by XAnge, a Franco-German venture capital firm.

Here are the top RegTech firms in the European market –

1. ComplyAdvantage

London headquartered ComplyAdvantage is a RegTech company that leverages uses AI and ML to help firms manage compliance obligations. The company provides data intelligence to help firms understand the risk of who they’re doing business with, while automating compliance and risk processes.

It recently announced a partnership with UK-based money management app, sync. in a bid to boost its fight against financial crime with a real-time database. ComplyAdvantage’s front-end configurability is expected to allow sync.’s compliance and risk management to perform more effectively.

Founded in 2014 ComplyAdvantage works with over 500 enterprise clients across 75 countries, including Earthport, a publicly-listed payments company, Azimo, an international money transfer services provider, and Lemon Way, a pan-European payments institution.

The company is backed by notable investors including Index Ventures and Balderton Capital, and has four global hubs in London, New York, Cluj-Napoca and Singapore.

2. Encompass

Scottish FinTech, Encompass has created an innovative KYC automation software that expects to enable better, faster commercial decisions. The software robotically searches structured and unstructured information sources to automate KYC, AML and EDD policies. Key elements including UBOs, PEPs, sanctions and adverse media are all identified, visualized and verified in seconds.

It recently collaborated with financial crime screening and KYC solutions provider, The collaboration is expected to help customers in streamlining KYC processes, enhance the quality of risk assessments, and reduce compliance costs. Accuity will be enabled to develop a new solution for improving customer due diligence through a quick KYC risk assessment at the point of onboarding or periodical review in a single search.

Founded in 2012, Encompass gathers and analyses a wealth of information to build a visual picture of a company or individual. It evaluates potential risks and opportunities with the visualisation of complex corporate structures, or an individual’s family and business network, aims to improve ROI on compliance spend and demonstrate compliance to regulators and auditors with accurate and complete KYC files and audit logs.

3. Fenergo

Irish FinTech Fenergo is a provider of client onboarding lifecycle management software for corporate, investment and private banks. Its onboarding technologies spans front and middle office operations with an aim to provide banking clients with an end-to-end client lifecycle management solution that includes compliance and banking process management such as onboarding compliance, legal entity data management, product onboarding, collateral management, client servicing, and credit mitigants and collateral management.

Recently, Fenergo released its mid-year findings on global financial institution fines. The study has revealed that by the end of July 2020, penalties worth $5.6 billion have been collected for non-compliance with AML, KYC, and sanctions regulations. Fenergo stated that the financial institutions in the US, Sweden, Germany, and Israel were the hardest hit with fines issued by APAC regulators increasing to almost $4 billion.

The Dublin-headquartered RegTech has also launched its e-KYC Connect solution in a bid to allow financial institutions to leverage KYC utility services.

4. NetGuardians

Established in 2007, NetGuardians is a Swiss RegTech startup that has developed an AI solution for banks to proactively prevent fraud. NetGuardians’ fraud-mitigation software uses the latest technology, including ML, big data, and user-behavior analytics to prevent fraud in real time across a number of banking areas. The software monitors all activities and transactions and raise an alert for any suspicious activity.

Recently, cloud banking platform Mambu entered a partnership with NetGuardians. The collaboration enables NetGuardians to offer its fraud mitigation software to the former’s clients for core banking integration.

NetGuardians serves over 50 Tier 1 to Tier 3 banks worldwide, including Aargauische Kantonalbank, HFC Bank Ghana, and Acleda Bank. Besides Switzerland, the company has offices in Poland, Kenya and Singapore.

5. Onfido

Founded in 2012, Onfido is a software company that helps businesses verify people’s identities using a photo-based identity document, a selfie and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.

Onfido provides identity verification through its online platform. The company uses manual and automated machine learning (ML) technologies, including optical character recognition and face detection, to compare and cross-reference a person’s facial biometrics with their identity document to prevent fraud.

Recently, Polish universal bank, Alior Bank, selected Onfido in a bid to boost its digital onboarding and KYC processes. The Bank’s applicants are now able to use Alior Mobile application for opening a personal account. Onfido’s partnership is expected to power ID verifications for the Bank and enable users to begin their digital journey with protection against identity fraud.

Onfido powers over 1,500 fintech, banking and marketplace clients globally, including Revolut, Remitly, and Bitstamp.