Build vs Buy: The Regulatory Data Layer
A practical guide for RegTechs scaling data coverage without compromising quality, auditability or trust.
Regulatory content is rarely “available” in a form a platform can rely on.
In practice, it is:
The result: teams spend disproportionate time building and maintaining data plumbing, instead of shipping product.
t’s tempting to start with crawling and extraction, especially when expanding coverage.
But crawling is the smallest part of the problem.
Once you ingest content, you still need:
Without this, scale creates instability, not product advantage.
Whether you build or buy, a usable regulatory data layer must support:
Comparable structures across jurisdictions and publishers
Requirements can be evidenced back to source
Updates, replacements, revocations, effective dates
Expand coverage without rewriting your model
Reliable input for AI, automation, and analytics
Buying the data layer isn’t outsourcing your product – it’s removing infrastructure overhead, enabling:
RegGenome data is built for trust.
Born out of University of Cambridge research and as a founding member of the Regulatory Genome Project, our information structures are reviewed with regulators, mapped to standards, and structured with standard-setting bodies.
This strengthens provenance, interoperability, and trust – giving you confidence in the accuracy and reliability of the information you access.
RegGenome provides regulatory content as structured data, designed to plug into RegTech platforms reliably
Core characteristics:
Jurisdiction-agnostic structures so your product doesn’t fracture by market
Consistent IDs so you can reference, map, and track
Provenance so outputs are explainable and defensible
Versioning and change history so you can manage regulatory evolution without manual patching
If you’re scaling a RegTech platform, the decision is rarely “build or buy”.
It’s usually:
Talk to our experts about your coverage goals, integration approach, and what “current and defensible” needs to mean for your customers.