With an anticipated wave of de-regulation, neither the U.S. nor the U.K. wants to apply the old way of regulation to the fintech firms that are becoming the new norm for financial services.

Could regtech be the solution?

“Fintech has started to permeate the [global] economy in one way or another—fintech is growing so large and so fast that it cannot avoid regulatory scrutiny,” said Milton Ezrati, chief economist for Vested, on a panel discussion held today at the British Consulate in NYC.

With the current review of rules like Dodd-Frank, the formation of an FCA-like sandbox environment in the U.S. doesn’t seem as far out of reach as it might have a few years ago.

When it comes to technologies like blockchain and AI, their impact on consumer banking shouldn’t be ignored. But that doesn’t mean that those tools don’t have an equal potential for innovation in regulation.

“The most exciting and most important developments [in fintech] are going to be AI, machine learning, predictive analytics,” Bina Kalola, managing director of global banking and markets, financial technology investments, for Bank of America said on the panel. “I am very excited about, and have been excited for a long time, about the potential of natural language processing.”

However, even when using those technologies to comply with regulation in both the U.S. and the U.K, there has to be some clarity about what financial regulations and regulators one needs to comply with. With recent events like Brexit, this is a grey area in the U.K.—however, the space is slightly more fragmented than that in the U.S.

The best example might be the work of the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, or FCA, which is attempting to consolidate all FIs (and fintechs) in a “sandbox” environment to provide both better consumer protection, and a space for those companies to innovate.

In the U.S., the problem is murkier, as the conflicting claim of dozens of agencies — state and federal — often mean that FIs get to assume the role of the rope in a jurisdiction tug-of-war.

“The innovation of fintech has brought services to thousands of people who can now take part in the global financial economy, and we don’t want that innovation halted [by regulation,” said Ezrati. “The FCA is the leader in the that.”

To learn more about the latest trends in fintech innovation, join us in San Jose on March 6-7 for Bank Innovation 2017, where the best conversations in fintech take place. Request your invitation here.