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This article is part of our Opinions section, where we invite industry professionals to share their views on the most pressing technology questions of our time.
For many fintech firms, growth is often anything but steady. It’s usually fast, sometimes messy, and, in most countries, always under scrutiny. One month you’re fine-tuning your product with a small team. The next, you’re onboarding thousands of users and responding to regulator queries.
When you’re growing quickly, it’s easy for compliance to slip down the priority list. Product and customer acquisition take precedence, and as a result, compliance processes and controls don’t always scale alongside them. But when you’re building a business that handles money, compliance isn’t something you can afford to overlook. And if your Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance doesn’t keep up with your expansion, the cost of growth can quickly outstrip the benefit.
So, how can you scale your fintech without getting caught out by regulators?
The pace you’re growing at doesn’t change what regulators expect from you. Whether you’re onboarding 500 customers or 500,000, you’re still expected to have a clear, consistent AML process in place. A task that only becomes harder when you add new customer types, expand into new markets, or roll out new products.
As your fintech grows, so does the potential for AML failures, missed red flags, and exposure to financial crime. When growth decisions are being made, such as entering new markets, forming new partnerships, or developing new products, your firm needs to be asking, “How does this affect our financial crime risk exposure?”
AML risk isn’t linear with your fintech’s growth, it’s unpredictable and regulatory requirements can change overnight. Add a few thousand more customers and your compliance workload doesn’t just increase but it can evolve dramatically in terms of complexity. Scaling often means serving new customers, rolling out new products, or entering new markets and regulatory environments.
A lot of firms leave hiring too late and compliance stays lean while the rest of the business grows. We often see compliance being juggled alongside other roles, with lean teams relying on shared docs, spreadsheets, and manual reviews until something goes wrong.
The 2024 case involving TD Bank in Canada is a clear warning about the consequences of under-resourcing compliance functions. After receiving a near two billion dollar fine for AML failures, the U.S. Department of Justice stated that “TD Bank starved its compliance programme of the resources needed to obey the law” and “failed to update its AML compliance programme to address known risks.”
As fintechs grow, the demands on compliance grow too. Regulators expect stronger oversight, better investigations, and tighter controls. Expectations rise and so does the need for experienced people armed with the right tools and technology to support them. A small team might be enough in the early days, but it won’t meet your firm’s ever-changing risk exposure unless you invest in your compliance function.
Onboarding processes that work well in the early stages of a fintech often aren’t built to last. What worked for your firm at 10,000 customers might buckle under the pressure of 100,000, especially if systems or processes haven’t been re-evaluated to keep up.
Too often, compliance frameworks are treated as static once they’re built. But what’s appropriate at one stage of growth rarely stays that way. Risk evolves. Products evolve. So does the makeup of your customer base. If your approach to client onboarding, monitoring, and investigations doesn’t evolve with it, the framework that once helped you stay compliant can quickly become the thing that holds you back, or worse lets bad actors slip through.
Legacy processes can slow teams down, bury them in manual reviews, or cause them to miss things that matter. Reviewing your setup regularly helps you catch those issues early. Ask the hard questions: Are our risk thresholds still appropriate? Is the data we’re relying on still accurate and complete? Are teams spending time on the right cases?
Technology plays a significant role here. If your team is still managing high onboarding volumes through spreadsheets and endless paper trails, you’re putting a lot of pressure on a small team without the visibility, consistency, or audit trail that regulators now expect.
It’s easy to think of AML failures as something that happens to traditional banks or less tech-savvy institutions, but regulators are increasingly focused on fast growing fintechs who fail to keep up with their own growth. Often, it’s a case of talented teams being stretched too thin, systems that don’t scale, or controls that stopped being fit for purpose six months ago.
Fines are the obvious outcome, but they’re not the only one. Businesses can pull partnerships. Regulators can delay authorisations. And customers, particularly businesses, won’t wait around if they start to lose confidence in how you’re handling their money. Reputational damage and bad PR is harder to fix than a policy gap, and harder to detect until it’s already showing up in lost customers.
Too often, compliance gets framed as a cost centre: something you have to manage, not something that drives value. But for fintechs that take it seriously and treat it as a core part of their strategy, it becomes a real advantage. Strong controls can speed up commercial conversations, reduce onboarding friction for customers and send the right message to regulators.
Internally, a good compliance culture and process means product, operations and commercial teams spend less time chasing approvals and more time getting things done. It stops being considered a blocker and starts being part of how your business scales and operates.
There’s also the customer view to consider. Frictionless onboarding, timely risk decisions, and consistent case handling improves compliance but also shapes the experience of doing business with you. In a sector where trust moves fast and brand loyalty is fragile, that matters more than it’s often given credit for.
When AML compliance is built into the way you scale, it speeds up decision-making, builds customer trust, and keeps regulators off your back. And for fintech firms, that can make all the difference in what lasting growth actually looks like.
