How RegTech can drive growth while bolstering compliance with real-time payments

As the payments revolution gathers speed, firms looking to capitalize are turning to RegTech, which offers increasingly sophisticated solutions to help them navigate this dynamic environment. 

Our recent Future of Payments Summit, included a session examining the critical role of RegTech in opening up new avenues towards secure business growth, featuring insights from Andrew Davies (Head of Global FCC Strategy at ComplyAdvantage), Dane Pedro (Head of UK Compliance and MLRO at Mollie), and Maya Braine (Managing Director and Head of Financial Crime at Cosegic).

This article explores some important talking points from the webinar and explains how RegTech can be a strategic enabler for business growth in the RTP era.

The rise of real-time payments

The global shift towards RTPs is undeniable, with global RTP transactions expected to hit $575 billion in value by 2028 by some estimates. This rapid expansion is fueled by a mixture of consumer demand for instant transactions, the continuous evolution of payment infrastructures, and regulatory efforts to keep pace with these innovations. 

The EU’s Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) is a crucial example of the latter. It aims to standardize and harmonize instant credit transfers across Europe while addressing concerns around security, accessibility, and technological challenges. The IPR requires payment service providers (PSPs) in the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) to be able to both send and receive instant payments by October 9, 2025. 

While jurisdictions like the UK and the US lack a similar regulatory mandate to adopt RTPs, consumer demand means take-up is also widespread across these regions. New payment rails, such as FedNow in the US or Canada’s Real-Time Rail (scheduled to be completed in late 2025), have expanded the options available to consumers. 

However, the speed and convenience that make RTPs appealing to consumers are the same factors that make them vulnerable to criminal misuse. However, legacy anti-money laundering (AML) compliance setups are unable to handle the new demands that RTPs present to financial institutions. 

RegTech use cases for real-time payments

The increasing complexity of the global payments ecosystem, driven by the rise of real-time payments, demands a shift beyond ad-hoc compliance decision-making and towards a more holistic approach. This requires dedicated resources and specialist software. 

With real-time payments increasing the risk of financial crimes like fraud by an estimated 10 times compared to traditional payments, the need for advanced RegTech solutions is acute. In our 2025 State of Financial Crime report, 90 percent of applicable firms reported needing either significant or moderate adjustments to their tech stack to be able to process secure instant payments in the EU. 

“Real-time payments are a good thing. People expect them. However, along with real-time payments, there is real-time financial crime risk.” 

Andrew Davies, Head of Global FCC Strategy, ComplyAdvantage

If your organization is looking to enhance its capabilities around real-time payment processing, these are the key RegTech use cases you should be evaluating: 

• Real-time customer screening and monitoring: Regulations such as the IPR, with its obligation for firms to screen their customers against sanctions lists at least daily, in practice, encourage the adoption of automated customer due diligence. Only conducting these checks at the point of payment fails to meet these requirements, while manual re-screening at set times is impractical and inefficient. Using AI to deliver updates to customer data in real-time is the most effective way to adapt your due diligence processes to RTPs. 
• Payment screening that supports fast payments: Customers increasingly expect payments to go through in seconds; following this lead, the IPR, for example, mandates firms to offer payments processed in under ten seconds, with 24/7 availability. This means you need to ensure your payment screening solutions can support high straight-through processing rates and are built on accurate data that won’t slow down your systems with excessive false positives.  
• Advanced transaction monitoring: As instant payments replace traditional ones, you have less time than ever to catch risks. This means your ability to analyze historical transaction data and surface risks that can only be revealed as part of a larger pattern, rather than during the transaction, is paramount. Using AI to detect anomalies and move beyond traditional rule-based monitoring enhances your ability to detect these risks and gain greater long-term visibility into the threats you face. 

Building the business case for RegTech investment

Both the business and compliance benefits of RegTech investment are maximized when compliance is an essential part of a business strategy from day one, rather than appearing as an afterthought or box-ticking exercise. To this end, engaging senior management for this investment often requires reframing compliance from a defensive cost to a strategic business enabler. 

“It’s about talking to senior management and making sure that they understand what is in it for us as a business if we do the right thing and we implement these new technologies and support.”

Dane Pedro, Head of UK Compliance and MLRO, Mollie

Some of the most significant business benefits of RegTech adoption are:

• New revenue channels: Innovations in the payments space, such as RTPs or open banking, place specific compliance demands on firms, particularly real-time customer and transaction risk detection. Choosing suitable RegTech solutions early on can help clear the path to new product innovation in these areas. 
• Operational efficiency: Automating compliance checks frees up analysts to focus on more complex or higher-risk cases, providing a greater return on your compliance spend. 
• Scalability: By automating repetitive, lower-risk elements of your compliance operation, you gain the ability to acquire new customers and process more transactions without having to increase the size of your compliance team at the same rate. 
• Enhanced customer experience: Faster onboarding, reduced friction, and increased customer trust can all be achieved with smart RegTech adoption. 
• Security and risk mitigation: Proactive compliance safeguards against the financial penalties and reputational damage that can result from AML failures. 

“If you get the compliance right, you can do these things. You can enable faster onboarding and a better user experience and increase customer trust and reduce fraud.” 

Maya Braine, Managing Director and Head of Financial Crime, Cosegic

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Choosing the right RegTech vendor: Key considerations

With multiple RegTech solutions available on the market, you should first create a framework for assessing them and finding the option that best matches your needs and existing capabilities. Some factors to consider are: 

• Real-time data updates: The efficiency with which vendors can track and apply changes to customer risk profiles, such as updates to sanctions lists or politically exposed person (PEP) data. 
• Risk scoring and alerts: The speed and accuracy of real-time risk scoring and alerts for suspicious customer behavior.
• Automation capabilities: Seamless automation of compliance checks across customer due diligence and transaction monitoring, which lets you redirect compliance resources towards higher-risk tasks. 
• Scalability: The vendor’s ability to grow along with your business and adapt to changing customer and transaction volumes.
• Data privacy and security: The robustness of systems with respect to data protection rules, with key features including encryption and multi-factor authentication.
• AI explainability: The transparency and auditability of AI decision-making an outcomes, which is an increasingly important element of regulatory reviews. 
• Customized workflows and robust APIs: The flexibility to tailor solutions to specific business models and integrate intuitively into existing systems.
• Ongoing customer support: With real-time payment infrastructures operating around the clock, uptime and customer support are an important part of the decision-making process. 

Leveraging API-first approaches for progressive renovation

While firms with specific regulatory or technical requirements often face a choice between sourcing multiple best-of-breed solutions or choosing a single vendor for all RegTech solutions, this doesn’t have to mean adopting an “all or nothing” approach to compliance upgrades. 

For many traditional financial institutions burdened by decades-old legacy systems, a complete overhaul is often impractical. This is where an API-first approach becomes invaluable, allowing companies to modernize their tech stacks in a progressive or modular way. Layering new, advanced systems onto an existing tech stack provides a more practical and lower-risk option than big-bang replacements of entire systems.  

This incremental modernization provides interoperability, auditability (with logs and metadata for every API call), and the flexibility to evolve along with business growth, regulatory updates, and changing risk landscapes – proving far more agile than replacing massive legacy systems wholesale. 

“With an API first approach, companies can more incrementally modernize. They can layer new capabilities onto the existing stack without having to replace the whole thing, which is just much more practical.”

Maya Braine, Managing Director and Head of Financial Crime, Cosegic

AI-first RegTech solutions from ComplyAdvantage

The journey towards fully leveraging real-time payments while maintaining robust AML compliance is ongoing. It requires continuous learning, adaptation, and a proactive approach to technology. 

ComplyAdvantage helps innovative FIs with AI-powered AML solutions designed to help them detect financial crime risks, complete regulatory requirements, and turn compliance into an efficient engine of growth. Our solutions include: 

• Real-time updates to risk data: Our proprietary risk intelligence (named ‘best of breed’ by Chartis) gives firms reliable data sourced straight from regulators and refreshed by automated systems.
• In-depth risk data: Gain deeper insights into customer networks with sanctions-related data that goes beyond just the names of sanctioned entities to include entities they control or are related to. 
• An integrated, easy-to-use platform: Fragmented data and siloed systems cause delays to both compliance and growth. With ComplyAdvantage, you can get holistic views of customer profiles and access all the data needed for case decisions on one screen.