Many FinTech CEOs sometimes find themselves frustrated and helpless when they have to make decisions about compliance.

They believe that they are very objective, pragmatic, and data-driven, but in reality, they make a lot of irrational and impulsive decisions that further slow down their compliance and business.

Here are some of the most common mistakes they make (and if you are the compliance expert, I am sure, you will be able to recognize those too):

• Founders or CEOs try to hire compliance experts from fast-growing companies, hoping that these people will know the secret sauce of how to make compliance scalable, but they don’t have a way of assessing whether these other companies grew thanks to this person’s contribution or despite that.  
• They hire compliance professionals based on credentials, knowledge, and past projects but don’t test for risk-taking capabilities or ability to deal with ambiguity. 
• CEOs or founders hope that the new person will come and fix all their compliance inefficiencies, but they themselves change nothing about how the company allocates resources or makes decisions about compliance… and expect a different result… Seriously?
• Sometimes founders or CEOs take over the overall compliance function management and decide to be the de facto head of compliance. As a result, they are unable to focus on growing their business because they are stuck with writing long explanations to regulators, auditors, bankers, and other financial partners.
• They don’t know when to overrule compliance decisions and when to listen, and because they don’t have a methodical cognitive approach to assessing compliance recommendations, they act impulsively and inconsistently.

Founders and CEOs are  usually very good at perseverance, so when none of the above strategies work out, they don’t give up, and try some of the following to fix the problems once and for all:

• They are researching competitors, signing up for their services, doing test transactions on their platform… trying to reverse-engineer their processes but this corporate espionage ends up being inconclusive.
• After successful funding rounds, founders and CEOs suddenly buy into the idea that committing more people and more resources will help the project grow faster,  so they hire more compliance experts but quickly see that more resources and people usually slow the project down. 
• When some licensing or partnership projects don’t move fast enough, FinTech CEOs try to diversify risks by creating more projects and more legal entities,  seeking more licenses at the same time, hoping that at least one of them would work faster, and as a result, they overhire, dilute focus, and overspend on projects that will be abandoned later. 
• Some CEOs and founders believe that there is a perfect jurisdiction where rules are easy, licenses are granted fast and businesses are allowed to do whatever they want without asking for any permissions, so when things slow down, founders feel unlucky or blame the jurisdiction instead of questioning their own decisions.
• Some CEOs put a lot of effort into networking, they go to conferences and industry events, hoping that their industry visibility will help the project go faster, without realizing that regulators and officials who attend conferences are not the same people who grant licenses, so they get very disappointed when they face bureaucratic hurdles in a new country despite the fact that someone promised it would be very business friendly. 

If some of these examples feel true, don’t get discouraged.

We have helped many FinTech founders and their teams see their blindspots and start deploying strategies that actually work. We summarized everything you need to know in this FREE Summary about 7 strategies to scale your FinTech startup! Follow this tested and proven FREE GUIDE to learn where to take sensible risks and avoid spending your limited resources too early!