The increasingly complex regulatory landscape will continue to challenge fintechs and the financial services industry in 2017. It remains to be seen if the finance industry can rise up to meet these new challenges, especially given the uncertainties and changes brought on by Brexit and the new administration.

The key to success will be close collaboration between authorities and the fintech sector in establishing a robust and agile regulatory system that fosters vigilance for the good of the economy and the people, yet promotes innovation and growth within the fintech sector. There is a massive opportunity for fintechs and financial institutions to take advantage of RegTech solutions that create operational efficiencies for a more effective compliance system that reduces human error and costs while enhancing customer experience and security.

Piyush Bhatnagar, CTO and Founder at Authomate

As we end the first quarter of 2017, we are starting to see some trends, some are continuing threats with an underlying problem with credentials and authentication. There is a distinct need to tie authentication and KYC together for adaptive authentication.

Enterprises will move towards context-aware adoptive authentication technologies that can add multiple additional factors of authentication based on the what is being accessed, where it is being accessed from, behavior of the user as well as user biometrics. Smartphone-based context-aware authentication and identity solutions will lead the way to stronger security and with increased user convenience. These technologies will not only make our digital world safer but will also allow systems to offer additional challenges based on the user context to ensure authorized access to systems, applications, data, and internet capable devices.

Ali Nazem, VP of BD at Shocard

In 2017 we are getting ever closer to the vision that people will expect access to what matters to them by simply proving who they are. They expect it to be fast and simple and they expect it to work in both the digital and physical world. What we are building is designed to be the single digital identity that enables this while maintaining both securely and with user-privacy.

Chirag Bakshi, CEO at Zumigo

Fintech will continue to find ways to help banks verify the identities of their customers for the purposes of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act of 2009. Two of the newest tools that have been introduced for customer authentication are mobile identity and location information. Comparing the name, address, email address, and phone number provided by the customer to what is on file with the carrier makes it harder to steal or fabricate an identity. Furthermore, using the location of a mobile phone helps to verify that the phone is in a location that makes sense based on the identity information provided.

Krishna Karambakkam, CTO and Co-Founder at CCOBOX Inc.

In 2017 we will continue to see an increased focus on anti-money laundering and terrorist financing, including a variety of algorithm based quantitative approaches. These capabilities will complement human analysts, drive scale and improved accuracy.

Over the next few years, we believe regulators will expect to see machine learning algorithms and sophisticated analytics as core components of bank compliance programs.

Compliance operations and technology are significant expense items for banks. As the regtech marketplace matures, newer compliance products will come with quicker integrations and higher ROIs. Dedicated end-to-end compliance solutions will see a competitive advantage over generic “do-it-yourself” computational platforms.

Nimrad Vax, Co-Founder and Head of Product at BigID

2017 is the year where identity data rules. The exponential increase in personal data breaches, privacy protection regulations (i.e. GDPR), and the adoption of big data analytics for KYC (know your customer) are reflecting the need for knowing your customer by knowing their data. The industry is responding and we will see a convergence of information governance and data protection solutions that create an inventory of the customers’ data across repositories and geographies. This gives consumers better control over their data, but also gives organizations a better way of understanding and protecting their customers’ information.