Regulation-As-Code: 2025 Could Be The Year Rulebooks Turn Into APIs
Back in the first wave of fintech, founders complained that deciphering a 4,000-page rulebook cost more than building the product itself. Ten years on, the sector's biggest economies have finally decided that the rulebook, not the startup, needs refactoring.
On the first of July 2025 the United Kingdom launched the Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO), a new body charged with turning every major piece of digital-economy regulation, payments, privacy, telecoms and online safety, into a single machine-readable library. Technology Secretary Peter Kyle's launch speech promised a future in which developers would query an API, not a PDF, whenever they needed to check the law. The announcement matters because it upgrades a decade of sandbox experiments into national policy: if RIO succeeds, compliance becomes a software dependency that can be version-controlled like any other.
How London Plans to Translate Prose Into Code
The Office's first mandate is to integrate guidance from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Ofcom, the Information Commissioner's Office, and the Competition and Markets Authority into a unified digital policy library that updates in near real-time. Just as importantly, it will expose those obligations as 'rule objects,' data structures a program can query for an instant true/false answer the moment code is moved into production.
The plumbing is already underway. Buried in the FCA's latest Competitiveness & Growth report is a line that speaks volumes: the regulator is 'mobilising a proof of concept for a machine-readable version of a subset of our Handbook rules.' In the pilot, ordinary text is converted into XBRL-based logic such as 'if overdraft APR > 39.9 per cent → flag breach of CONC 6.7.23.' When rules behave like functions, core banking systems are able to test every transaction automatically and stream compliance telemetry back to supervisors.
RIO will bankroll the tooling through the £20 million Regulators' Pioneer Fund, inviting supervisors to publish coded rule sets on GitHub and share them as open-source building blocks for industry. Officials describe it as moving from 'sandbox to suptech' - putting regulators and start-ups on the same continuous-integration pipeline.
A Chorus Building Beyond Britain
The push to treat regulation as code is not uniquely British. In the Netherlands, the joint DNB-AFM InnovationHub already answers cross-agency queries within five days and now plans to publish those responses as public APIs so that the second firm asking the same question gets an automated reply instead of an email chain.
Canada's OSFI has gone further on the supervisory side, making its Regulatory Reporting System the sole channel for prudential returns. Templates are machine-validated on upload; if a single field breaks schema, the file never reaches an analyst.
Singapore's MAS is watching closely. Industry insiders say the authority's next sandbox cohort will trial JSON-encoded guidelines under the banner 'Project FinReg,' an initiative that dovetails with MAS's wider push to embed compliance directly into cross-border payment prototypes such as Project Mandala. This BIS collaboration demonstrated on-chain, compliance-by-design transfers last year.
Even Australia, traditionally laissez-faire, is inching toward multi-agency 'regulatory cells.' A recent Treasury consultation on scam-prevention codes floated the idea of coordinated approach to avoid 'two regulators taking simultaneous action against a breach,' not dissimilar to RIO's backstage-coordination model.
Meanwhile the Bank for International Settlements is urging supervisors to adopt open data standards so that rule objects created in London can run unedited in Amsterdam or Singapore. A BIS working paper on 'RegOps' sketches a future in which granular reporting flows via APIs and regulatory logic is stored in a shared code repository rather than buried in narrative guidance.
Why the Timing Finally Works
Three forces make 2025 the tipping-point year. Generative AI now parses centuries of statute and drafts consistent code stubs in minutes, slashing the manual tagging costs that sank earlier attempts. Post-COVID digitalisation forced banks to rebuild their tech stacks; those same institutions are demanding regulators match their new release cadence. And compliance budgets keep marching higher, McKinsey estimates risk and compliance spend will rise 5 percent a year through 2028, outpacing revenue growth for most banks. Treating rules as reusable code is the last big lever left to flatten that curve.
The Hard Problems Still Ahead
Not every regulation fits neatly into an if-then statement. Principles-based mandates like 'treat customers fairly' resists binary translation; strip away nuance and firms may optimise for the API rather than the outcome. Interoperability is another issue: without common taxonomies, a workflow that passes in London could fail in Frankfurt. The BIS effort is a start, but reaching consensus across scores of jurisdictions will be messy.
Liability looms largest. If a regulator-supplied rule object is buggy, does the fault lie with the supervisor, the developer who consumed it, or the board that signed off deployment? Lawyers are already drafting clauses. Finally, there is the money question: RIO's launch budget, roughly £10 million, looks meagre alongside the FCA's £678 million annual spend. Whitehall has not ruled out industry levies once prototypes become production infrastructure.
What to Watch Next
Over the next twelve months three milestones will show whether regulation-as-code is hype or inevitability. In August 2025 RIO aims to publish its first fully machine-readable chapter, likely the new data-portability rules, for public use. By Q4 2025 the FCA expects to open an optional Handbook API to sandbox firms, creating the first live test of developer demand. And in April 2026 Singapore's MAS will decide whether to codify its AI model-risk guidelines; insiders say positive feedback on the platform could tip the scales toward full adoption.
Why This Matters
Rules that can be queried like software change the economics of innovation. Instead of hiring a squad of lawyers to interpret 1990s prose, a fintech can embed a compliance check directly in its CI/CD pipeline and deploy the same afternoon. Supervisors, in turn, receive telemetry in real time, not a quarter late, and can spot systemic risks before they metastasise.
If London's experiment works, regulatory compliance will shift from PDF footnotes to Git commits. For the global financial sector, that could be as transformative as moving from batch settlement to real-time payments. By year-end we will know whether the world's rulebooks are ready to join the API economy, or whether innovators must keep wading through PDFs for a little while longer.
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