AI-Powered Compliance Helps FinTechs Navigate Regulation and Innovation

Two months into 2025, the business definition of a FinTech is becoming fluid, broadening in ways that scarcely would have been imaginable a short time ago.

Companies in the sector have been reexamining their go-to-market strategies amid a changing regulatory environment and shifting expectations among ever-younger customers, Maverick Payments Chief Operating Officer Ben Griefer told PYMNTS as part of the “What’s Next in Payments” series on what it means to be a FinTech in 2025.

At a high level, platforms are embracing the chance to expand beyond their core offerings into financial services, but they must avoid the pitfalls of becoming the proverbial “Jack of all trades and master of none” strategy, Griefer said.

“Years ago, you’d see third-party platforms and companies ‘staying in their lane’ to focus on their core offerings,” he said. “Now, we’re seeing them getting into embedded finance and lending — and even banking as a service, and monetizing payments.”

The ripple effect of those expansionary efforts has been one of financial inclusion, with higher acceptance rates for consumers and other applicants, and lower operational costs, Griefer said.

“Whether it’s fraud prevention or making the checkout process easier and less expensive by using network tokens, this is the natural evolution that merchants are taking advantage of to grow the business in a sustainable way … and supplement the consumer ecosystem as well,” he said.

For platforms and merchants using FinTechs to reach new users, “demographics are extremely important,” Griefer said. Offering digital wallets, including Google Pay and Apple Pay, resonates with young consumers who tend to spend so much of their daily life online and on their phones. In addition, one-click checkout is being more widely adopted across eCommerce platforms, leading to higher adoption.

Some Universal Considerations

No matter the use case or the niche the FinTechs might target, through the past year-and-a-half, there has been a “tremendous amount” of regulatory scrutiny of relationships between sponsor banks and FinTech platforms, focused on compliance and know your customer (KYC), he said. FinTechs have had to look beyond the confines of product and front-end designs to reinforce their back-end operations.

“The common theme here that we’re seeing is those kind of core requirements that are ultimately required by the regulators are not going to go away,” Griefer said, especially as FinTechs harness artificial intelligence to help streamline their own operations as well as those of their clients.

Key issues in focus include the use of AI to improve the onboarding process that any financial services company has when bringing merchants, businesses or individual users into the fold.

“People expect onboarding to be frictionless, easy and responsive — and to be done across phones, tablets and computers,” Griefer said.

Integrating third-party tools means that lenders can make quicker underwriting decisions while ensuring a positive user experience.

“Once they are onboarded, AI is proving extremely valuable when you’re looking at transaction modeling … and activity from actual users,” he said. “AI is going to be crucial as we move into faster payments.”

That means automating analysis and decisioning, especially because real-time fund flows offer only milliseconds for examination, he said.

“The only way to realistically do that, especially at scale, is through tools like AI,” Griefer said.

Scale represents a long-term goal for FinTechs, and Griefer said partnerships can make the attainment of scale a realistic endeavor. Software platforms that seek to monetize payment processing, to name one example, don’t want to be distracted or burdened by building out their own payments offerings. Entering partnerships with firms like Maverick, through its white-labeled solution, can keep a client firm’s “brand identity,” while offloading infrastructure management.

“As you have FinTechs and various software companies looking to grow their user base while also offering other financial tools as a value add, they need to be laser-focused on what they do best while leveraging a company like where us we do the payments … better than they can, and it’s a lot quicker to go to market,” Griefer said.