By FINTECH Books Contributor, Jay Patani Follow: @j_patani Before the financial crisis, compliance was in the dark ages – a mere box-ticking exercise, reduced to calculating a few basic metrics on a spreadsheet. The integrity of data was questionable; data size was small; and data was often stale with lots of gaps. Regulators’ inability to identify the structural frailties of the financial system was partly due to banks’ failure (and unwillingness) to exploit the predictive power of data lying dormant in these organisations.However, recently, responding to the pace of regulatory change, technology companies are creating innovative RegTech solutions, which are fueled by advances in different fields within big data. One such field is streaming analytics. Traditional analytical methodologies such as ETL (extract, transform and transform) rely on batch processing, which results in delayed insights. Today’s regulatory problems require real-time decision-making and therefore real-time data processing. Streaming analytics enables financial institutions to analyse multiple stream of data or events. Complemented by an additional layer of machine learning or AI, there is a huge opportunity for streaming analytics to radically transform and even automate the current way that compliance teams function. I will discuss how streaming analytics will transform key financial services use cases. Cyber security and fraud detection are prime applications for streaming analytics, where processing and visualising fast moving data can help to identify and manage risks of a cyber attack or fraudulent transaction while also decreasing the number of false positives. Streaming analytics also offers a novel solution to regulatory reporting. Closer data integration between regulators and banks could allow regulators to access a constant stream of critical information. This marks a shift away from current manually-intensive reporting obligations. Regulators can also become more predictive rather than reactive. Streaming analytics technologies range from emerging open source frameworks to more established proprietary packages. Whichever RegTech companies choose to adopt, it will be essential for them to incorporate a real time component into their future product offerings.