Regtech in a nutshell: Companies in Germany (and elsewhere) are subject to numerous (and extensive) regulations. Especially in Germany, Compliance requirements are a serious challenge for entrepreneurs. Compliance comes along with bureaucratic hurdles. Elon Musk recently asked angrily how entrepreneurs in Germany can still be successful in the face of a bureaucratic overkill; to the same tune, Raoul Rossmann, board member in the eponymous retail group, stated sarcastically in a Handelsblatt interview : „We have to be careful that our companies do not become law firms with an associated commercial enterprise.“

RegTech could thus be understood as smart technology-driven business models that support companies in meeting legal compliance requirements. In fact, RegTech is understood somewhat more narrowly: It is about technologies for the digitalisation of reporting, specifically in relation to the finance industry. RegTech is understood in this narrower sense as a subset of FinTech. It is about automating money laundering checks, checking money transactions for fraud indications and the like.

Here I present 7 promising German RegTech start-ups – in the narrower sense, but also in the broader sense. As always, the rule is: no older than 7 years. Enjoy the read!

Alyne

The company Alyne compiles a comprehensive toolkit or library of templates that systematise/facilitate decision-making, monitoring and process design around cyber security, risk management and compliance. Checklists, material for training, assessment lists for external service providers, software used, guidelines for business continuity management, the introduction of cryptographic procedures, procedural and organisational principles against data loss, for data protection and more.

Foundation in 2015. In Munich. Website: www.alyne.com

Elucidate

The company Elucidate gives banks a 360-degree data-driven platform to identify, mitigate and assess the risk of financial crime in real time. A range of FinCrime and Compliance Key Risk Indicators are provided. It can also be used to comply with regulatory requirements. This enables compliance with know-your-customer (KYC) and money laundering regulations.

Foundation in 2018. In Berlin. Website: www.elucidate.co

SignD

The start-up from Vienna provides an answer to requirements around identity verification (Know-Your Customer, money laundering), risk assessment of potential new customers or court-proof digital signatures. For this, SignD delivers a turnkey white-label solution that orchestrates solutions from the leading providers of biometric identification, forensic analysis, PSD2, database services and open source intelligence. With just one integration.

Fondation in 2019. In Vienna. Website: www.signd.id

Legaltegrity

Under the EU Whistleblower Directive, companies with more than 50 employees (though nation states can raise the threshold to up to 250 employees) and public authorities and municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants will be required to set up channels through which breaches of national and EU law can be reported.

To enable companies to meet this requirement, the start-up Legaltegrity has positioned itself with an easy-to-use product. The system runs cloud-based and guarantees the anonymity of whistleblowers.

By the way: The founders of Legaltegrity point out that crimes in the economic sector do not generate a need for action not in regulatory terms. After all, it is true that companies lose an estimated 5% of their annual turnover due to crimes in the economic sector.

Foundation in 2019. In Frankfurt / Main. Website: www.legaltegrity.com

This EU directive should (actually) have been implemented nationally by 17 December 2021; however, there has been no implementation into German law to date. The corresponding legislative procedure for the German “Whistleblower Protection Act” failed (at the first attempt) in April 2021. So much for the state of affairs …

Lawcode

Another start-up provides a tool to meet the requirements of the EU Whistleblower Directive. The start-up Lawcodey provides the so-called Hintbox. The slogan: “The Hintbox is available to you within a few minutes”.

Foundation in 2020. In Koblenz. Website: www.lawcode.eu

Legal Horizon AG

Legal Horizon AG‘s product does not focus exclusively on the financial industry, but can be used across all sectors. The Legal Horizon Scanning (LHS) tool compiles individually relevant laws for each client. The software solution focuses on keeping track of regulations, their changes and the monitoring of corresponding regulations.

In this respect, the tool automates the information gathering and monitoring of the regulatory framework. This makes it possible to automatically collect the global publications of the regulatory authorities as input, to sort them and to evaluate them. They are then made available to the responsible specialist departments in the company.

The tool – unsurprisingly – uses artificial intelligence (AI). The company constantly updates the data collection and models the legal logic of the respective jurisdiction through AI. In doing so, the tool has a workflow functionality so that each department only receives the regulatory provisions relevant to them for further decision-making.

Foundation in 2016. In Magdeburg. Website: www.legalhorizon.de

Nect GmbH

The Nect GmbH focuses on the identification and authentication of natural persons. The range of services includes the product “Nect Robo-Ident”, in which several services are bundled. These include end2end processes and features from the areas of “digital identity” and biometric technologies that use AI.

In contrast to Video-Ident, remote identification (Identity Verification as a Service) is carried out entirely by AI. Biometric identity documents are read, videos are recorded and speech is evaluated.

Foundation in 2017. In Hamburg. Website: www.nect.com

Incidentally, I would like to recommend the KPMG RegTech Market Study, which I used for screening the regtech start-up scene. Some text passages describing companies are also taken from this study. I am therefore indebted to my former employer KPMG. DOWNLOAD HERE

Promising StartUps in other industries and areas

Author

The author is a manager in the software industry with international expertise: Authorized officer at one of the large consulting firms - Responsible for setting up an IT development center at the Bangalore offshore location - Director M&A at a software company in Berlin.