For years, the regulatory technology world has been neatly divided. RegTech was what regulated firms bought to help them comply, while SupTech was what authorities used to supervise them.
According to CUBE, that division is breaking down fast, and the industry is heading towards a single, connected regulatory ecosystem in which supervisors and the supervised rely on the same underlying platforms.
CUBE argues that the old split was always about who owned the technology, not what it actually did. Expectations have shifted from “help me comply” to “give me trusted, real-time regulatory intelligence I can act on”. Firms no longer want passive tools that simply collect regulatory text. They want a live, machine-readable view of global obligations, mapped to their operations and backed by a solid audit trail.
Regulators want the same. Authorities worldwide are embedding SupTech into core supervision, with AI, data access and cloud infrastructure as the key enablers. CUBE points out that 197 financial authorities across 140 countries now use at least one SupTech solution, up sharply from 54 in 2022. As both sides chase the same capabilities, the buyer label matters less than the shared functionality beneath it.
AI is the main accelerant. For firms, compliance has moved from a periodic, manual task to continuous, real-time interpretation. For regulators, supervision is shifting from reactive and sample-based to proactive and evidence-led. The UK Financial Conduct Authority’s Mills Review, a first-of-its-kind study of how AI will reshape retail financial services by 2030, went further by urging the FCA to build an “AI-enabled agentic supervisory model” on the same agentic paradigm as the firms it oversees. FCA-commissioned research cited in the review found around 11 million UK adults are likely to use AI that acts autonomously within set goals, with trust and control their chief concern.
In CUBE’s view, that trust gap is exactly why shared, traceable regulatory data matters. The future it describes rests on machine-readable regulation, common data standards and AI that interprets obligations consistently on both sides, with a knowledgeable human in the loop as a non-negotiable. Agents handle data mapping, control tagging and monitoring, while people provide judgement and escalation. International momentum is building too, with IOSCO launching a SupTech Forum in 2026 and the FCA aligning its AI testing approach with the MAS.
CUBE acknowledges the caveats. The Mills Review’s recommendations remain advisory rather than policy, and adoption is uneven, held back by cyber risk, data quality, skills and funding. Even so, CUBE believes trust and provenance will decide the winners. Firms struggle to trace obligations back to source, while regulators need evidence of compliance across entire markets. In CUBE’s words, a system rebuilt from scratch would look less like a wall and more like a web.
For more insights into the convergence, read the full story here.
Copyright © 2026 FinTech Global
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
