Regulatory technology, also known as a "RegTech" is a new field within the financial services industry that utilizes information technology to enhance regulatory processes. It puts a particular emphasis on regulatory monitoring, reporting and compliance and is thus benefiting the finance industry.
The objective of RegTech is to enhance transparency as well as consistency and to standardize regulatory processes, to deliver sound interpretations of ambiguous regulations and thus to provide higher levels of quality at lower cost. Oftentimes RegTech companies utilize the cloud through software-as-a-service.
RegTech to date has been focused on the digitization of manual reporting and compliance processes, for example in the context of Know your customer requirements. This offers significant cost savings to the financial services industry and regulators. However, a 2016 academic paper suggested that the potential of RegTech is far greater stating that "it has the potential to enable a close to real-time and proportionate regulatory regime that identifies and addresses risk while also facilitating far more efficient regulatory compliance".
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_technology