Beyond Finance: Why RegTech Principles Matter for Clean Fuels
RegTech—short for “regulatory technology”—emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. As banks struggled with an avalanche of new rules, fines, and fragmented reporting, a new wave of technology solutions stepped in to help. These “RegTech” platforms automated compliance, standardised reporting, and gave regulators and institutions a shared source of truth.
Fast forward to today, and the parallels for clean fuels couldn’t be clearer.
The RegTech Playbook
McKinsey highlights four core categories of RegTech:
Financial risk and capital management – ensuring institutions balance exposure.
Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) – scanning and interpreting regulations across jurisdictions.
Cybersecurity – ensuring resilience under evolving requirements.
Financial crime prevention – monitoring transactions to flag fraud and laundering.
What unites these categories is fragmentation. Multiple regulators, multiple systems, and ever-changing rules. The value of RegTech has been in connecting the dots—automating what was once manual, bringing clarity to complexity, and building trust in data.
A Clean-Fuels Industry at the Same Crossroads
Clean fuels face a similar challenge. Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) and other low-carbon fuels are subject to a patchwork of registries, certification schemes, and reporting requirements across regions. Airlines, producers, and corporates want to prove their sustainability claims—but the systems to verify them remain siloed, manual, and prone to error.
Just as banks once spent billions on fines and compliance costs, fuel producers and buyers now risk credibility, regulatory scrutiny, and missed market opportunities if they can’t prove traceability.
From RegTech to FuelTech
This is where ZerraLedger comes in. Borrowing from the RegTech playbook, we’re building an interoperability gateway that allows clean-fuel registries, producers, and buyers to exchange verified data seamlessly. Think of it as a “ledger for clean fuels”—a layer of trust that sits above fragmented systems.
Like RegTech, our focus is on:
Automating compliance – reducing manual reconciliation across multiple registries.
Standardising data – so SAF claims look the same in Sydney as they do in Singapore.
Enhancing monitoring – giving buyers, auditors, and regulators confidence in reported use.
Future-proofing trust – enabling rapid adaptation as policies, schemes, and markets evolve.
Why Now
McKinsey projects the RegTech market will grow 14% annually through 2028, driven by complexity, fines, and digital adoption. Clean fuels are on the same trajectory: complexity is increasing, penalties for greenwashing are rising, and digital infrastructure is lagging behind demand.
The lesson is simple: industries that wait to digitize compliance fall behind. Industries that embrace trust-enabling infrastructure scale faster.
That’s the path we’re building with ZerraLedger.