The Usual Suspects, A New Playground
Of course, where there’s a multi-billion-pound problem, you’ll find the usual tech giants circling with a solution. Microsoft, with its colossal Azure cloud platform, is perfectly placed to offer banks an entire compliance ecosystem. Oracle, the old master of databases, can manage the mind-boggling amount of data this all requires. And then there’s IBM, bringing its Watson AI to the party, promising to spot the clever criminals that simpler, rule-based systems might miss.
These aren't flashy startups, they are the established titans of technology. They are now applying their immense scale and expertise to a problem that every single major financial institution on the planet has to solve, and solve now. To me, this creates a compelling theme, one that some are calling RegTech Stocks: Bank Compliance Risks Drive Growth, because the demand is practically baked in. Once a bank is plugged into one of these complex systems, the cost and risk of switching to a competitor are huge, creating a wonderfully sticky customer base.