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Ahead of his speaking appearance at Fintech Connect on December 2-3, Ritesh Singhania, CEO and co-founder of Zango, talks about his and Zango’s story, how AI is transforming fintech startups, and where the industry can improve.

Hi, Ritesh. Could you tell us a little bit about you and your career to date, as well as the story of how Zango came about?

I’ve spent the last decade building products at the intersection of financial services, compliance and AI, including co-founding ClearGlass (a RegTech company) and serving as Head of Product at Simplitium (later acquired by Nasdaq). Zango emerged from seeing the same issue across institutions: compliance teams overwhelmed by regulatory change, manual processes and fragmented systems. I met my co-founder Shashank through my wife, and we founded Zango to solve exactly that.

With AI being such a fundamental part of Zango’s proposition, did the idea come before the technology, or the other way around?

The idea came first: compliance workflows were breaking under regulatory pressure, and manual approaches weren’t sustainable. Advances in AI then made it possible to build an intelligent compliance layer - one that combines high-accuracy models with human expertise to deliver audit-ready outputs institutions can trust.

How do you assess AI transforming the fintech startup landscape, as well as fintech more widely?

AI is shifting fintech from digitising workflows to truly automating them, especially across compliance, risk and operations. But the startups that succeed will be the ones that earn trust - not just build the best models. Institutions are looking for evidence, governance and reliability, and the companies that can prove their AI is safe, accurate and auditable will be the ones that break through.

What is the biggest lesson you have learned from the building phase at Zango and why?

Trust is everything. Financial institutions won’t adopt AI unless the evidence, explainability and human oversight are built in from day one. Focusing early on model evaluation, reinforcement learning from real client use, and expert review has been critical to building credibility.

Could you provide an example of the customer journey, from ideation to implementation? What were the key pain points and why was Zango the right solution?

One client at a large European bank relied heavily on consultants for horizon scanning and policy updates, creating delays and rising costs. By training our agents on their regulatory profile and layering expert review on top, we consolidated their workflows and cut both time and consultant spend dramatically - by a factor of seven. The result was faster decisions, clearer evidence and significantly lower operational overhead.

Where are the key elements of AI utilisation and capability that financial services professionals need to focus on? What can the industry do better?

The priority is operationalising AI safely through strong governance - clear taxonomies, human oversight, model evaluation and robust auditability. Another key gap is skills: recent UK government research shows the AI skills shortage is most acute in legal and compliance teams, even though they’re central to safe adoption. The industry needs to focus on building practical capability in these teams so they can leverage AI day-to-day.

Without giving too much away, what will be the key message of your panel on Ethical AI in RegTech?

Ethical AI isn’t a blocker to innovation; it’s the enabler that lets institutions scale automation safely. When transparency, evidence and human oversight are built into the design, AI can actually strengthen compliance and reduce reliance on reactive, manual processes.

What can we expect from Zango in the next 12 months?

Alongside expanding the capabilities of our AI compliance layer, we’re partnering with independent researchers on a major initiative examining the future of AI governance in financial services. This work helps ensure our platform evolves in line with emerging best practice and furthers our collective understanding of how institutions can safely operationalise AI at scale.

Ritesh Singhania is speaking on the panel ‘Ethical AI in Regulatory Technology: Balancing Innovation & Compliance’ on December 2. Find out more and register your place here today.