For fintech startups

"Fintech" is six regulators
wearing one word.

A stablecoin issuer, a payments API, a neobank, a prediction market, an AI broker-dealer and an agent that moves money on a user's behalf share almost nothing in regulatory terms. They answer to different agencies, on different statutes, with different first filings. Apparently starts by establishing which of those you actually are — then builds the obligations from there.

Find your regime Jump to your segment

Apparently is software, not a law firm. Nothing here is legal advice, and describing a regime does not mean we are registered with, endorsed by, or approved by the agency that administers it.

Orientation

The first mistake is answering to the wrong agency

Most early fintech compliance spend goes into the regime the founders assumed they were in. The expensive version of that mistake is not doing too little — it is doing a year of careful work against the wrong statute, and finding out when someone with subpoena power asks.

Mechanics, not marketing

Regulators read what the product does

Whether you hold customer funds, who bears the loss, who is being advised and who makes the decision — those mechanics decide the regime. The category on your homepage does not.

Stacking

One product often sits under several regimes at once

A card programme with a stablecoin balance and an advice feature can be a money-transmission question, a bank-partnership question and a securities question simultaneously. They do not collapse into one answer.

Timing

The bank partner asks before the regulator does

For most early fintechs the first real examination is a sponsor bank's diligence. Programmes are usually built to survive that, then have to be rebuilt when the actual supervisory expectations arrive.

By sub-segment

Six populations, six different first years

Each of these is a distinct regulatory population with its own primary authority, its own triggering events, and its own set of things you carry permanently once you are live.

State money-transmission regulators · FinCEN · SEC or CFTC depending on the asset

The asset decides the agency, and the agency decides everything after it

Digital-asset businesses rarely get to choose their regulator. How a given token is characterised — and whether you take custody of it — determines whether you are principally in a money-transmission regime, a securities regime, a derivatives regime, or several at once. Two products with identical interfaces can land in different places on custody alone.

What creates the obligation

  • Taking custody of customer assets, or holding the keys that control them
  • Operating a fiat on-ramp or off-ramp, which is money transmission in most states
  • Facilitating exchange between users, which raises exchange and broker questions
  • Issuing a token, where the characterisation question decides the regime
  • Issuing or distributing a payment stablecoin, which is treated differently from transmitting one
  • Offering yield, staking or lending, which frequently draws securities analysis

What you carry once you are live

  • State money-transmitter licences and their bond, net-worth and permissible-investment conditions
  • FinCEN money services business registration, renewed on its own cycle
  • An AML programme with a designated officer, training, independent testing and monitoring
  • Suspicious activity and currency transaction reporting, and Travel Rule handling on transfers
  • Proof-of-reserves or attestation expectations from counterparties and, in some states, regulators
  • State-specific regimes such as New York's virtual-currency licensing framework

Typical first filings

State MTL applicationsFinCEN MSB registrationAML programme adoptionSurety bonds

The characterisation of a specific asset is a legal judgement, and it is genuinely contested for many assets. Apparently does not make that call for you; it makes the consequences of each answer explicit and keeps the resulting obligations current.

State banking departments via NMLS · FinCEN · Nacha and the card networks · CFPB

Fifty licensing regimes, then the rules nobody calls regulation

Moving other people's money is licensed state by state, and the licence is only half the burden. The network rules, the sponsor bank's requirements and the consumer-protection regime around error resolution shape day-to-day operations at least as much as the licence does.

What creates the obligation

  • Holding funds at any point between payer and payee, even briefly
  • Deciding whether an agent-of-the-payee or similar exemption genuinely applies to your flow
  • Adding a new state, since the licence is per state rather than national
  • Changing control, adding executives, or crossing ownership thresholds at a licensee
  • Launching a new payment rail, which brings that rail's own rulebook with it
  • Moving from a sponsor-bank model toward holding a licence in your own name

What you carry once you are live

  • Money-transmitter licences maintained through NMLS, with renewals and annual reporting
  • Minimum net worth, surety bonds and permissible-investment coverage of outstanding obligations
  • Quarterly and annual reports of transaction volume and outstanding transmission liability
  • BSA/AML programme, transaction monitoring, and suspicious activity reporting
  • Error-resolution and disclosure duties under the electronic fund transfer rules
  • Network and rail rulebook compliance, plus data-security obligations from card requirements

Typical first filings

NMLS state MTLFinCEN MSB registrationSurety bondsControl person filings

Federal banking agencies · state banking departments · CFPB · your partner bank's examiners

You are either renting a charter or applying for one, and they are different companies

Neobanks live on a fork in the road. Partner-bank models put you inside someone else's supervisory perimeter, where their examiners effectively become yours. Charter applications put you directly in front of a federal or state banking agency, with capital, governance and business-plan scrutiny that is a different order of work.

What creates the obligation

  • Signing a sponsor-bank agreement, which imports that bank's third-party risk expectations
  • Describing the product in a way that touches deposit insurance, which is closely policed
  • Holding customer funds directly rather than as an agent of the bank
  • Launching credit, which brings lending licensure and fair-lending obligations
  • Applying for a charter, trust charter or industrial bank, each with its own application regime
  • Adding an interest-bearing or yield feature, which changes the product's legal character

What you carry once you are live

  • Third-party risk management expectations flowed down through the bank partnership
  • Consumer-protection compliance: disclosure, error resolution, and unfair or deceptive practice risk
  • Accurate representation of deposit insurance in every customer-facing surface
  • Complaint handling, monitoring and reporting, which regulators read as a supervisory signal
  • Programme-level audits and testing that the partner bank is required to obtain
  • Fair-lending analysis and adverse-action handling wherever credit decisions are made

Typical first filings

Bank partnership diligence packState lending licencesProgramme policiesCharter application (if pursued)

Commodity Futures Trading Commission · National Futures Association · contesting state gaming regulators

Event contracts are a derivatives business, and the perimeter is actively contested

A market in the outcome of an event is regulated under the Commodity Exchange Act, not by a state gaming board — which means designation or listing on a designated contract market, clearing arrangements, registered intermediaries and contract-level review. The boundary between an event contract and regulated gaming is one of the most actively litigated questions in the sector, and it is being fought jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

What creates the obligation

  • Listing a contract whose payout depends on the outcome of an event
  • Operating the venue yourself, which raises designated contract market requirements, versus listing on someone else's
  • Contract categories subject to heightened review, including those touching gaming or unlawful activity
  • Taking customer funds as an intermediary, which raises futures commission merchant status
  • Introducing customers to a market for compensation, which raises introducing broker status
  • Marketing into states whose gaming regulators assert their own jurisdiction over the product

What you carry once you are live

  • Registration and NFA membership obligations for the intermediary roles you occupy
  • Contract submission and certification process for each listed market
  • Customer funds segregation and the reporting cadence attached to it
  • Market surveillance, recordkeeping and trade-practice obligations
  • AML programme and customer identification, as a financial institution
  • Parallel exposure to state gaming enforcement while the perimeter remains contested

Typical first filings

Registration filingsNFA membershipContract certificationsDisclosure documents

Whether a particular contract is a lawful event contract, regulated gaming, or neither is a legal judgement that turns on the contract's terms and on developing case law and agency action. Apparently is not registered with, endorsed by, or approved by the CFTC, the NFA, or any state gaming regulator.

Securities and Exchange Commission · FINRA · state securities regulators

The model can generate the recommendation. It cannot hold the obligation.

If a system recommends securities to retail investors, or effects transactions for others, the securities regime attaches regardless of how the recommendation was produced. Registration, membership, supervision and record obligations sit with the firm and named individuals — and supervising a model that produces recommendations is now a first-order examination topic rather than a footnote.

What creates the obligation

  • Effecting transactions in securities for the account of others, which is the broker definition
  • Making a recommendation to a retail investor, however it was generated
  • Providing advice about securities for compensation, which raises adviser registration instead
  • Holding customer funds or securities, which changes capital and custody obligations sharply
  • Deploying a model that ranks, filters or personalises what an investor sees
  • Adding registered persons, branch locations, or a new business line to an existing firm

What you carry once you are live

  • Broker-dealer registration, self-regulatory membership, and continuing membership review before material changes
  • Registration, qualification examinations and continuing education for associated persons
  • Net capital, customer protection and reserve obligations appropriate to the business model
  • Books and records, including retention of the communications and the outputs the system produced
  • A supervisory system that reaches the model: documentation, testing, change control and escalation
  • Best-interest and conflict obligations for retail recommendations, including conflicts embedded in a model

Typical first filings

Form BDNew member applicationIndividual registrationsWritten supervisory procedures

Supervisory expectations for models that shape investor-facing recommendations are an active area of regulatory attention, and firm obligations are not reduced because a system rather than a person produced the output.

CFPB and prudential regulators · state attorneys general and state AI statutes · sector regulators

Building toward the space, or newly in it, with a model at the centre

Agentic products, autonomous underwriting, AI-driven collections and copilots that act on a customer's behalf all raise the same structural question: when a model makes or shapes a decision, the obligation attaches to the firm, and the firm has to be able to explain the decision. That expectation exists today under long-standing consumer-finance law, before any AI-specific statute is layered on.

What creates the obligation

  • A model that decides, prices or denies credit, which brings adverse-action and fair-lending duties
  • Using data about consumers in a way that raises consumer-reporting obligations
  • An agent that initiates payments or trades on a user's behalf, which raises the underlying licence question
  • Automated customer communications, which carry the same unfair-and-deceptive-practice exposure as human ones
  • Deploying in states with consequential-decision statutes governing automated decision systems
  • Vendor or foundation-model dependencies, which regulators treat as your third-party risk

What you carry once you are live

  • Explainability sufficient to produce specific reasons for an adverse decision
  • Model governance: documentation, validation, monitoring, versioning and change control
  • Disparate-impact testing and monitoring where outcomes affect protected classes
  • Third-party and model-vendor oversight, including what happens when a dependency changes
  • Records of what the system did, when, and on what inputs
  • Privacy and data-use obligations across financial-privacy rules and state privacy law

Typical first filings

Model governance policiesAdverse-action frameworkVendor oversight programmeUnderlying activity licences

A model does not create or remove a licensing obligation. What the product does with money, credit or advice does — the automation only changes how hard it is to explain afterwards.

Regardless of segment

Five obligations almost every one of you ends up holding

Whatever regime you land in, these tend to attach. They are also the ones most often deferred until a bank partner, an auditor or an examiner asks for them in writing.

Financial crime

An AML programme that exists on paper and in practice

Most fintechs are financial institutions for anti-money-laundering purposes, or serve one that is. The programme is examined on operation, not on adoption.

  • Designated compliance officer
  • Risk assessment and training
  • Independent testing
  • Monitoring and reporting

Licensing

State-by-state licences, with control-person duties attached

Most financial licensing is state-level. Once held, licences carry renewal, reporting and change-of-control obligations that reach your cap table and your executive hires.

  • Per-state applications
  • Renewals and annual reports
  • Change of control
  • New executive filings

Consumer protection

Disclosure, error resolution and fair treatment

Unfair or deceptive practice exposure attaches to marketing, product design, pricing and servicing — and complaint volume is read by supervisors as a signal about all four.

  • Disclosure review
  • Error resolution
  • Complaint handling
  • Marketing substantiation

Privacy

Financial privacy plus a growing state layer

Financial-privacy rules set a federal floor on how customer information is used and safeguarded, and state privacy statutes add obligations that vary by state and by data type.

  • Privacy notices
  • Safeguards programme
  • Vendor data terms
  • State-specific rights

Third parties

Your vendors are your supervisory problem

Banking and consumer regulators treat outsourced functions as retained responsibility. Diligence, contract terms and ongoing monitoring of critical vendors are expected to be evidenced.

  • Diligence records
  • Contractual controls
  • Ongoing monitoring
  • Exit planning

Evidence

A record that survives a change of staff

Examinations ask what you concluded, when, and on what basis. That is answered from what was retained at the time, not reconstructed from memory two funding rounds later.

  • Decision records
  • Authorities relied on
  • Version history
  • Retention

Sequence

From "we think we might be regulated" to a maintained obligation set

  1. 01

    Classify

    Describe the product mechanically

    What moves, who holds it, who is advised, who decides and who bears the loss. Those answers select the regime — and where a product spans several, each one is resolved separately rather than averaged into a single conclusion.

    Fund flowsCustodyAdviceDecision rights
  2. 02

    Determine

    Resolve which authorities attach, and where

    Federal registration, state licensing, self-regulatory membership and network rulebooks are identified against the actual product and footprint, each with the authority behind it recorded.

    FederalStateSRONetwork rules
  3. 03

    Structure

    Decide what to hold and what to rent

    Sponsor bank versus own licence, listing on someone else's venue versus operating one, introducing versus holding customer funds. Each choice trades speed against permanence, and each has a different obligation tail.

    Partner modelOwn licenceCharter path
  4. 04

    Build

    Assemble the programme and the applications together

    Policies, procedures and the application file are built from the same profile, so what you tell a regulator matches what you tell a partner bank and what your team actually operates.

    PoliciesApplicationsDisclosures
  5. 05

    Operate

    Keep the set current as the rules and the product move

    New states, new products, new executives, new investors and amended rules all change the obligation set. Those changes are surfaced against the profile rather than discovered during diligence.

    New statesNew productsRule changesRenewals

AApparentlyTomorrow

Apparently works out what you owe.
Tomorrow makes it something you can hand off.

A regulatory obligation is a cost with a deadline and a consequence attached. Today it sits entirely on the company that holds it. Apparently is the layer that determines and maintains those obligations. Tomorrow — The American Risk Exchange — is the layer being built to turn a maintained obligation into a defined, priced position that an institutional counterparty can take on.

  1. Apparently

    Identified

    Which obligations attach to this business, in which jurisdictions, under which authority — and what each one requires next. Kept current as the underlying rules move.

    • What applies, and to whom
    • The document and disclosure each one demands
    • The date it next comes due
  2. The handoff

    Quantified

    A maintained obligation can be described in the terms a risk desk needs: what it costs to satisfy, when it falls due, how exposed it is to a rule change, and what happens if it is missed.

    • Cost and effort to satisfy
    • Deadline and renewal cadence
    • Sensitivity to a change in the rule
  3. Tomorrow

    Transferable

    Once an obligation is defined that precisely, it stops being an open-ended liability and becomes a position — one an institutional counterparty can price and hold, continuously rather than per policy term.

    • A defined position, not a vague liability
    • Priced against a maintained obligation set
    • Institutional counterparties only
See the full picture heretomorrow.co

Tomorrow is a separate company building The American Risk Exchange. Nothing on this page is an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to enter into any transaction, and no product described here is offered to retail participants. Availability of any risk-transfer arrangement depends on its regulatory treatment and on counterparty eligibility. Apparently, Inc. is a software platform, not a law firm, an insurer, or a registered exchange, and describing a regulatory regime here is not a claim of registration with, endorsement by, or approval from any agency.

Questions

Asked by founders at this stage

We are pre-launch. Do we need any of this yet?

The classification question does not wait for launch — it decides your architecture, your funding conversations and whether the product you are building is the one you can actually operate. Licensing work has long lead times, and most of the expensive rework we see comes from products built before anyone established which regime applied.

Our sponsor bank handles compliance. Is that not enough?

A sponsor bank imports its supervisory expectations onto you, and its examiners look through the partnership at your programme. Banking regulators treat outsourced activity as retained responsibility, which means the bank's diligence is a floor on what you need, not a substitute for it.

How do you handle products that span two regimes?

They are resolved separately. A wallet with a yield feature and an advice surface can raise money-transmission, securities and consumer-protection obligations at once, and collapsing them into a single answer is how obligations get missed. Each conclusion carries the authority it rests on.

Is a prediction market a CFTC question or a gaming question?

Event contracts traded on a designated contract market are regulated under the Commodity Exchange Act by the CFTC. Several state gaming regulators have asserted jurisdiction over similar products, and the boundary is actively contested through litigation and agency action. Where a specific contract falls is a legal judgement about that contract, and we describe both regimes rather than assuring you which one applies.

Does using AI change our licensing obligations?

Not by itself. The obligation follows what the product does with money, credit or advice. What automation changes is the supervision and explanation burden: you still have to be able to say why a decision was made, keep records of what the system did, and supervise the model the way you would supervise a person doing the same job.

Are you a law firm?

No. Apparently, Inc. is a software platform. It is not a law firm, a broker-dealer, a bank or a money transmitter, and it is not registered with or approved by the SEC, CFTC, FINRA, FinCEN or any state financial regulator. Nothing here creates an attorney-client relationship.

Establish the regime first. Everything else follows from it.

Describe the product mechanically — what moves, who holds it, who is advised and who decides. Apparently resolves that into the regimes that attach and the obligations each one creates.

Get startedFintech overview

Apparently, Inc. is a software platform and is not a law firm, a broker-dealer, a bank, a money transmitter, or a registered exchange. It is not registered with, endorsed by, or approved by the SEC, the CFTC, FINRA, FinCEN, the OCC, the CFPB, or any state financial regulator. Descriptions of these regimes are general information, not legal advice, and how a specific product is treated is a legal judgement about that product.