From: FinTech Global
Brexit could change the realities of wealth management and how WealthTech companies can navigate the new realities is something Zaliia Gindullina, head of business development at Kidbrooke, discussed in a recent podcast.
The Edventure Brief podcast interviewed Gindullina about Kidbrooke’s pivot from being a consultancy to becoming one of the most innovative WealthTech companies in the world, exemplified by its place on the coveted WealthTech100 list last year.
Since its pivot into FinTech, Kidbrooke has been busy designing application program interfaces (APIs) for the wealth management industry and developing new solutions.
Its OutRank platform is a plug-and-play toolbox of APIs designed to aid banks and insurers, as well as financial functions within other industries, to strengthen their operations by automating labour-intensive analytical processes.
Co-founder and CEO Fredrik Davéus has previously boasted that the solution provides a holistic, high-quality and fast service that is easy to use, customisable to the customer’s needs and provides a transparent result that “can be easily tied to fundamental assumptions [which] means less compliance overhead.”
This transparency, Gindullina said when speaking with the podcast hosts, is a key factor enabling the company to quickly scale to new nations with new jurisdictions, adding that Kidbrooke always makes sure to check the local regulations to ensure that they are not breaking any laws.
“That would be the tax regimes, for examples,” she said. “I think that it is also important to mention that we’ve structured our software in a way that any decision made on the behalf of our customers, who are using our APIs, would be explainable for the authorities or for the internal teams to examine it and audit.”
Speaking about what regulations may affect its business, the conversation led to Brexit. When asked what the UK’s divorce from the EU will mean for regulations, Gindullina replied, “We don’t know how it will work out, because who knows? Where does the UK go after it has left the European Union is a good question for all of us.”
Gindullina added that she didn’t believe there would be any immediate changes to the regulations. “But maybe I am wrong,” she said. “It is such an area where you just don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow.”
The conversation about how Brexit will affect the FinTech and RegTech ecosystem has been raging essentially since the 2016 referendum. Some envision that it could lead to considerable regulatory burdens further down the line.
“Brexit could potentially create significant problems for RegTechs and FinTechs based in the UK which have a large European client base as there will be obstacles and new parameters for them in terms of selling products and services cross border within the EU,” Remonda Kirketerp-Moller, founder and CEO of Muinmos, the RegTech company, recently told FinTech Global.
“If the UK leaves the EU without a deal, differing EU member states will have differing requirements when dealing with the UK and this will make matters particularly complicated.”
Some results can already be seen, with Tech Nation reporting in November that UK tech talent visa applications had jumped over the previous two years, with 45% and 48% increases per year.
In Europe, the European Securities and Markets Authority announced in January that it had pulled the plug on ten British credit rating agencies and trade repositories in the Brexit aftermath.
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