Ready to put your skills to the test in a real-world scenario? In the Capstone Project, you will get to collaborate in groups to develop a minimum viable product around a given theme. The Capstone Project requires participants to work in groups around a given theme, implementing both front and back-end services as necessary to create a minimum viable product. The module culminates in group project presentations, as well as the submission of final reports documenting the capstone project. 

This capstone project equips participants with hands-on experience in developing a full-stack web app project. Participants will create interactive prototypes in a tool such as Figma, before creating production-ready web solutions through structured development methodologies that incorporate UI/UX principles.

By the end of the module, participants will have completed a functional web app prototype and deployed it to a cloud hosting platform. 

This module is part of a sequential programme and is not available on a standalone basis.

The financial crash of 2008 has led to increased regulation of financial services and the patchwork of resulting national and international laws has placed an enhanced compliance burden on companies. RegTech solutions are helping to ease the pain by assisting companies to keep abreast of new requirements and integrate the capacity to comply with them into their existing systems. Hence the emergence of RegTech.

Over the last ten years, compliance functions have increased their resources and have widened their range of tasks, with a dramatic increase in their monitoring and surveillance activities, whether manual or substantially automated. This growth has reflected, in part, the post-crisis regulatory reform agenda and more intensive and intrusive supervision. Compliance functions now have an increased profile and higher expectations placed upon them.

RegTech uses technologies such as advanced analytics, robotic process automation, cognitive computing and the cloud to achieve regulatory and compliance outcomes more efficiently and effectively. It is easy to get carried away with new technologies that ultimately don’t deliver. Most financial organisations’ use of RegTech is in its infancy and obstacles lie in the way. But RegTech has the potential to improve service and protection for customers and to help restore trust in the industry.

In financial services, the emergence of open banking models, artificial intelligence for fraud prevention, AML surveillance on cryptocurrency transactions, blockchain-KYC integration, immersive experiences, digital twins, event thinking, and continuous adaptive security will each create a foundation for the next generation of digital business models and ecosystems. RegTech startups have accelerated the pace of technological change in the financial services sector.

So far, regulation in financial services is almost exclusively targeting the intermediaries that act as providers of such services. However, with the advent of decentralised business models (e.g. blockchain-based models) and knowledge-based systems that cut out the middle-man, the approach for whom we regulate and which measures we use to create trustworthy interactions will have to be redesigned as well.

RegTech uses technologies such as advanced analytics, robotic process automation, cognitive computing and the cloud to achieve regulatory and compliance outcomes more efficiently and effectively. It is easy to get carried away with new technologies that ultimately don’t deliver. Most financial companies’ use of RegTech is in its infancy and obstacles lie in the way. But RegTech has the potential to improve service and protection for customers and to help restore trust in the industry.

Initial uses of RegTech have revolved around use by market participants such as financial institutions, and emerging FinTech companies to reduce compliance costs by automating typically manual information gathering and reporting processes. The understanding and then adoption of RegTech can, however, be challenging in companies that have technology and capacity constraints. In some, even though the goal may be to introduce and use RegTech solutions, legacy internal processes, lack of policy insights and lack of capacity may in of themselves handicap this goal.