RegTech Meets Philanthropy: How Compliance Technology Is Reshaping Grantmaking

Regulatory technology -- commonly shortened to RegTech -- originated in financial services, where banks and insurers use software to automate anti-money-laundering checks, sanctions screening and reporting. The same principles apply directly to philanthropy. Funders face rising compliance expectations from regulators, trustees and the public, yet most still rely on spreadsheets, email threads and manual register lookups to verify grantees.

The result is a widening gap between what good governance demands and what grants teams can realistically deliver. The Charity Commission assessed 3,132 serious incident reports in 2024-25 (Charity Commission Annual Report 2024-25), while BDO's Charity Fraud Report found that 34% of UK charities reported incidents of fraud or attempted fraud in the last twelve months. At the same time, the number of charities filing accounts late surged 51% to 17,773 in 2023-24, adding complexity to even basic eligibility checks.

RegTech addresses these pressures by automating repetitive verification tasks -- register lookups, policy document reviews, sanctions screening -- so that grants officers can focus on the judgement calls that technology cannot make. It does not replace human decision-making. It removes the drudgery that slows it down.

This guide explains what RegTech means for funders, where it adds most value, and how to adopt it without overcomplicating your workflows.

What is RegTech and why does it matter for funders?

RegTech is software that automates regulatory and compliance processes. In financial services, where the term originated, McKinsey estimates that RegTech solutions can lower compliance costs by 30-50% while increasing accuracy. The global market was valued at approximately USD 19 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow substantially through the decade, with multiple analysts projecting compound annual growth rates exceeding 20% (Grand View Research, 2025).

For grantmakers, the compliance challenge is structurally similar to financial services, though smaller in scale. Funders must verify that applicant organisations are legally registered, financially sound and properly governed before awarding funds. They must screen against sanctions lists, check safeguarding policies, review accounts, and maintain evidence that every step was completed. Across the roughly 170,000 registered charities in England and Wales alone, this creates enormous volumes of repetitive data gathering.

RegTech in philanthropy typically covers four areas:

• Register verification -- automated lookups against the Charity Commission, Companies House, OSCR (Scotland) and the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland.
• Document analysis -- AI-assisted review of governance documents, safeguarding policies, equality policies, accounts and insurance certificates.
• Sanctions and risk screening -- checks against OFSI consolidated lists and adverse media.
• Reporting and audit trails -- timestamped records of every check, finding and decision for board assurance and regulatory review.

The goal is not to eliminate human oversight. It is to let technology handle the data retrieval and pattern-matching so that grants officers spend their time on interpretation and decision-making.

What compliance tasks can RegTech automate?

Not every compliance task benefits equally from automation. The highest-value targets are repetitive, data-heavy checks that follow predictable rules. Here is where RegTech adds most value in a typical grantmaking workflow:

These time estimates are illustrative, but the pattern is consistent: tasks that involve fetching data from known sources and checking it against defined criteria are excellent candidates for automation. Tasks that require contextual judgement -- deciding whether a finding is material, weighing risk against the value of a project -- remain human responsibilities.

How does automated due diligence work in practice?

A practical RegTech-enabled due diligence workflow follows a predictable sequence. The applicant submits their details, uploads required documents (governance document, safeguarding policy, accounts, insurance certificate, bank statement), and the system takes over the verification layer.

Step 1: Register lookups. The system queries the Charity Commission for England and Wales, Companies House, OSCR or the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland depending on the organisation's registration type. It retrieves the charity's name, registration number, status, trustees, filing history and financial summary. If the charity has a linked Companies House registration, the system fetches that too, checking directors, filing status and registered office.

Step 2: Document analysis. Each uploaded document is read by an AI model trained on the specific requirements for that document type. A safeguarding policy, for example, is checked for a named designated lead with contact details, DBS check references (not outdated CRB references), coverage of online safety, regular review dates, and relevant legislation. A governance document is checked for dissolution clauses, asset locks, conflict of interest provisions, board procedures and trustee rotation requirements.

Step 3: Risk flagging. Findings are classified by severity -- high, medium or informational. A missing safeguarding lead would be high severity. An outdated policy review date might be medium. The absence of provisions for remote board meetings is informational. This classification helps grants officers prioritise their review time.

Step 4: Human review. A grants officer reviews the automated report, applies professional judgement, records their decision, and -- where needed -- contacts the applicant for further information or updated documents. The entire exchange is logged as part of the audit trail.

This workflow means that the officer's first interaction with an application is a structured summary of verified findings, not a stack of unread PDFs. According to IVAR's Open and Trusting Grant-making research, reducing unnecessary paperwork helps shift the funder-grantee relationship towards one based on dialogue rather than document-chasing.

What are the risks of getting compliance wrong?

The consequences of inadequate due diligence are both financial and reputational. BDO's Charity Fraud Report found that 73% of charities that experienced fraud suffered a financial loss, with 10% reporting losses of up to one million pounds and 5% exceeding that figure. On the regulatory side, the Charity Commission opened 112 new statutory inquiries in 2024-25, up from 89 the previous year, with a significant driver being "double defaulting" charities that failed to file accounting information for two or more years (Charity Commission Annual Report 2024-25).

For funders specifically, compliance failures can result in:

• Regulatory scrutiny -- The Charity Commission expects trustees to exercise proper oversight of grant-making activity, including proportionate due diligence checks (CC3 guidance).
• Financial loss -- Funds awarded to ineligible or poorly governed organisations may be irrecoverable.
• Reputational damage -- Public trust in the funder is undermined when grants end up in the wrong hands, particularly for public-sector and high-profile funders.
• Board liability -- Trustees who fail to implement adequate controls may face personal liability for resulting losses.

The cost of non-compliance in grantmaking extends beyond direct financial losses. It includes the opportunity cost of diverted staff time, legal fees, and the chilling effect on future grant-making when boards become overly risk-averse in response to a compliance failure.

RegTech does not eliminate these risks. It reduces the likelihood of human error in the data-gathering phase and provides an auditable record that demonstrates due process was followed.

How should funders balance compliance with proportionality?

One of the persistent tensions in grantmaking is the balance between thorough compliance and proportionate practice. IVAR's Open and Trusting Grant-making programme has documented how excessive due diligence requirements can deter smaller organisations from applying, effectively excluding the communities most in need of funding. The Foundation Practice Rating 2025 report found that 21 of the 100 foundations assessed had no website at all, suggesting that transparency and accessibility remain significant challenges even at the structural level.

ACF's Foundations in Focus 2025 report showed UK charitable foundations increasing their grant-making to a record 8.24 billion pounds in 2023-24, with application volumes rising dramatically -- in some cases by 100-400%. This surge makes proportionate compliance more important than ever: funders cannot manually process the same depth of checks for every application when volumes have quadrupled.

A risk-based approach uses technology to apply different levels of scrutiny depending on the grant size, the applicant's track record and the nature of the project:

• Light touch (micro-grants under 10,000 pounds): Automated register lookup to confirm active status and basic eligibility. Minimal document requirements.
• Standard (grants of 10,000-100,000 pounds): Register checks plus AI-assisted review of governance, safeguarding and latest accounts. Officer reviews flagged issues.
• Enhanced (grants over 100,000 pounds or high-risk contexts): Full document suite including insurance, bank statements, budgets and inspection reports. Detailed AI analysis with officer-level review of all findings. Site visits or trustee interviews where appropriate.

This tiered model ensures that the depth of compliance is proportionate to the risk, while the baseline automated checks protect the funder against obvious red flags at every level. For more on implementing this in practice, see our guide on risk management in grantmaking.

What should funders look for in RegTech tools?

Not all compliance technology is created equal. Funders evaluating RegTech solutions should consider several practical criteria:

Coverage of UK registers. The tool should query the Charity Commission for England and Wales, Companies House, OSCR and the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland directly, not rely on stale or third-party data. Cross-referencing between registers (e.g. checking a charity's linked Companies House record) is essential for thorough verification.

Document intelligence. Basic tools just store uploaded files. Effective RegTech reads the documents -- checking safeguarding policies for a named lead and DBS references, governance documents for dissolution clauses and conflict of interest provisions, accounts for income trends and reserve levels. The analysis should be transparent, showing what the system found and what it flagged, rather than producing an opaque risk score.

Audit trail. Every check should be timestamped, linked to the specific application, and stored as a permanent record. This is not optional -- it is the foundation of regulatory assurance. Boards and auditors should be able to reconstruct the compliance history for any grant at any point.

Human-in-the-loop design. The system should present findings for human review, not make decisions autonomously. Grants officers must be able to override, annotate and escalate. See our guide on human-in-the-loop grantmaking for a detailed treatment of this principle.

Integration with grant workflows. Compliance checks should fit naturally within the application and assessment process, not require officers to switch to a separate system. Results should be available alongside application data, panel summaries and grant agreements.

Data security and GDPR compliance. The tool must handle sensitive organisational and personal data in line with UK GDPR, with encryption, access controls and clear data retention policies. See our guide on GDPR and grantmaking.

How Plinth brings RegTech into grantmaking workflows

Tools like Plinth take RegTech principles and embed them directly into the grant management workflow, so compliance checks happen as a natural part of the application process rather than a bolt-on afterthought.

When an applicant submits documents to a Plinth-managed fund, the platform automatically queries the relevant UK registers -- Charity Commission, Companies House, OSCR or the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland -- pulling live data on registration status, trustees, directors, filing history and financial summaries. If a charity has both a Charity Commission number and a Companies House registration, both are checked and cross-referenced.

Uploaded documents are then analysed by AI against detailed checklists specific to each document type. A governance document is assessed for legal structure, dissolution clauses, asset locks, conflict of interest policies, trustee tenure, board procedures and whether remote meetings are permitted. Safeguarding policies are checked for named leads, DBS references, online safety provisions and regular review dates. Accounts are analysed for income sources, reserve adequacy, year-on-year trends and late filing. Even bank statements and insurance certificates are reviewed for validity and coverage.

Each check produces a structured summary with issues classified by severity -- high, medium or informational -- giving grants officers a clear starting point for their review. All findings are saved to the grant record with timestamps, creating a permanent audit trail. Officers can rerun checks when documents are updated and the results are stored alongside the previous assessment.

Plinth offers a free tier, making these capabilities accessible to smaller funders and community foundations that may lack the budget for enterprise compliance platforms. The platform also handles monitoring, reporting and grant agreements, so compliance is integrated across the full grant lifecycle rather than isolated in the application phase.

What does the future of RegTech in philanthropy look like?

The regulatory environment for UK grantmaking is becoming more demanding, not less. The Charity Commission's shift towards proactive risk assessment -- including its first-ever sector risk assessment highlighting financial resilience challenges -- signals that regulators expect funders to demonstrate robust oversight. At the same time, the 92% of charities that were up to date with their returns at the end of 2024-25 (up from 81% the year before) suggests that the sector is improving its own compliance posture, creating better data for automated verification.

Several trends are likely to shape RegTech adoption in philanthropy over the coming years:

• Real-time monitoring. Rather than checking registers only at the point of application, funders will move towards ongoing monitoring -- receiving alerts when a grantee's filing status changes, when trustees resign, or when adverse information emerges.
• Shared due diligence. Multiple funders supporting the same organisation currently duplicate the same checks independently. Shared platforms or portable compliance certificates could reduce this burden for both funders and applicants.
• Predictive risk indicators. As RegTech tools accumulate data across thousands of applications, they will begin to identify patterns -- for example, that organisations with certain governance characteristics are more likely to encounter delivery problems.
• Cross-border compliance. For funders working internationally, RegTech will increasingly need to integrate verification across multiple jurisdictions and regulatory frameworks.

The trajectory is clear: compliance technology will become as standard in grantmaking as it already is in banking. The question for funders is not whether to adopt it, but how quickly they can do so without losing the relational, trust-based approach that distinguishes good philanthropy from box-ticking.

For a broader view of where philanthropic technology is heading, see our guide on the future of philanthropy technology.

Frequently asked questions

Will RegTech replace grants officers?

No. RegTech handles data retrieval and pattern-matching -- fetching register data, reading policy documents, flagging missing elements. Grants officers interpret findings, weigh context, exercise judgement and build relationships with applicants. The technology makes officers more effective, not redundant.

Is specialist training needed to use RegTech tools?

Most modern RegTech tools for grantmaking are designed to be used by non-technical staff. Basic onboarding is usually sufficient. The key requirement is that officers understand what the automated checks are doing and can critically evaluate the findings, rather than accepting them uncritically.

Does RegTech work for micro-grants?

Yes, and arguably it is even more valuable at lower grant values. Manual due diligence on a 2,000 pound grant can cost more in staff time than the grant itself. Automated register lookups and lightweight document checks make proportionate compliance feasible for micro-grants without consuming disproportionate resources.

How does RegTech handle organisations not registered with the Charity Commission?

Many legitimate grant recipients -- community interest companies, social enterprises, unincorporated groups -- are not registered charities. Good RegTech tools check Companies House for CICs and limited companies, and allow configurable checks for unregistered organisations where the funder applies manual oversight with documented rationale.

What data security standards should RegTech tools meet?

At minimum, UK GDPR compliance with encryption at rest and in transit, role-based access controls, documented data retention policies and the ability to respond to data subject access requests. Look for ISO 27001 certification or equivalent where handling sensitive personal data.

Can RegTech checks be reused for grant renewals?

Yes. If a grantee has been through a full due diligence process, subsequent renewals typically require only an update check -- confirming that registration status has not changed, accounts remain up to date, and policies have been reviewed. This reduces the burden on both funder and applicant.

How much does RegTech cost compared to manual compliance?

Costs vary widely, but the comparison should include staff time spent on manual checks. If a grants officer spends 60-90 minutes per application on due diligence and processes 200 applications per year, that is 200-300 hours of staff time annually -- before accounting for monitoring and renewals. RegTech tools, including free-tier options like Plinth, can reduce this substantially.

Is RegTech suitable for public-sector funders?

Yes. Public-sector funders often face the highest compliance requirements and the largest application volumes. RegTech is particularly valuable for local authorities, government departments and arms-length bodies managing competitive grant rounds with hundreds or thousands of applications.

Recommended next pages

• How to Automate Due Diligence in Grantmaking -- Practical workflows for replacing manual checks with automated verification.
• Grant Compliance Guide: Ensuring Regulatory Adherence -- Essential UK compliance requirements and practical controls for funders.
• Risk Management in Grantmaking -- How to build proportionate risk frameworks across your grant portfolio.
• Audit Trails in Grant Software -- Why timestamped records matter and how to implement them effectively.
• The Future of Philanthropy Technology -- Broader trends in how technology is reshaping charitable giving.

Last updated: February 2026