Why I stopped treating regulation as a tax
It turned out to be the most defensible thing we built.
For most of my career I treated regulation the way a lot of builders do: as a tax. A cost you pay to operate. Something that sits between you and the work that actually matters, slowing every launch, adding a layer of people who say no for a living. You budget for it, you resent it a little, and you try to spend as little time inside it as you can.
Building a payments company from zero in Saudi Arabia changed my mind completely.
The licence is not paperwork
At SiFi we set out to win a SAMA Major EMI licence from scratch. As employee number two, I was close to all of it. And the first thing that surprised me was how much of the licence was actually product work in disguise.
A regulator does not ask you to fill in a form. A regulator asks you to prove that you understand your own business well enough to run it safely. How do you keep customer funds separate from company funds. What happens to a transaction when it fails halfway. Who is accountable when something goes wrong at 2am. How do you know your customer is who they say they are, and how do you know that next year too.
Those are not compliance questions. Those are the questions you should be able to answer about any product you put real money through. The licence just forced us to answer them before launch instead of after our first incident.
Slow is the point
The thing nobody tells you is that the slow path is the defensible one.
When the route to market takes the better part of a year of unglamorous work that never shows up in a demo, most people give up or cut corners. That is exactly why it is worth doing. A feature can be copied in a sprint. Pricing can be matched in an afternoon. A licence and the operating discipline underneath it cannot be cloned by a competitor who is in a hurry, and almost everyone is in a hurry.
I used to think the moat was the product. In a regulated market, a large part of the moat is the patience and the standard of care that the licence demands. The barrier that frustrates you on the way in is the same barrier that protects you once you are through it.
Regulation is a product surface
The mistake I see teams make is treating compliance as a department that lives next to the product rather than inside it. KYC, onboarding checks, transaction monitoring, statements, dispute handling: customers experience all of these directly. They are not back office. They are some of the most emotionally loaded moments in the entire experience, because they happen exactly when someone is trusting you with their money.
So we started treating them like product. The onboarding check got the same attention as the dashboard. The failure states got designed, not bolted on. The statement, which is a compliance artefact, became something a finance lead could actually read. When you do this, the regulator stops being an obstacle and becomes a demanding first user, one with very specific taste about correctness. That is a user worth designing for.
What I would tell a founder entering a regulated market
A few things I wish someone had told me earlier.
Treat the licence like a product launch, with a single owner, a real plan, and weekly progress, not like a legal chore you delegate and forget. The teams that win licences treat them as the company’s most important deliverable for that period, because they are.
Talk to the regulator like a stakeholder, early and often. Surprises are the enemy. The relationship compounds.
Build the boring things well. Reconciliation, audit trails, access controls. These never make a launch video and they are the difference between a company that survives its first hard week and one that does not.
And stop apologising for being slow. In a regulated category, speed to a half-built launch is not an advantage. It is a liability you have not noticed yet.
The reframe
I no longer think of regulation as the tax on building something real. In the categories I care about, the regulation is part of what you are actually selling. People are not buying a card or a dashboard. They are buying the confidence that their money is safe and that someone competent is accountable for it. The licence is the most concrete promise you can make that this is true.
The slowest path to launch turned out to be the most defensible thing we built. I would not trade it for six months of speed.
Draft. Verify any specifics against your own account before publishing. Personal opinion, not legal advice.