Prerequisites

What You Need to Begin

This book assumes no prior technical expertise in computer science, data science, or programming. It does assume professional literacy in financial services or a genuine motivation to acquire it. Specifically:

Assumed Knowledge

Financial Services Familiarity You should have a basic working knowledge of how financial markets operate — what a broker-dealer does, why banks hold capital, what a trade is and what settlement means. If you work in financial services, you already have this. If you are coming from outside, Chapter 2 will help establish the regulatory context, and the Glossary and Appendix B will fill gaps as you read.

Professional Literacy This is a professional-level textbook. It is written for practitioners and assumes you are comfortable with long-form expository text, working through complex arguments, and tolerating ambiguity when no clear answer exists.

Regulatory Intuition Some familiarity with the general concept of financial regulation — that banks are supervised, that there are rules about money laundering and market abuse, that regulators can impose fines — is helpful but not strictly required. Part 1 builds this context explicitly.

What Is NOT Required

Programming experience You do not need to be able to write Python. You need to be able to read it at a high level — to understand what a block of code is doing even if you couldn't write it yourself. Chapter 4 provides enough Python orientation for non-programmers. If you want to run the code examples, follow the setup instructions in how-to-use-this-book.md.

Mathematics Mathematical intensity in this book is deliberately low. Where formulas appear, they are explained in plain language alongside the notation. You do not need calculus, linear algebra, or statistics beyond a conceptual understanding of probability and averages.

Legal training This is not a law textbook, and regulatory analysis here is practical rather than doctrinal. Where legal definitions matter, they are stated clearly and cited to primary sources.

Setting Up Your Python Environment (Optional)

If you want to run the code examples:

Step 1: Install Python Download Python 3.10 or later from python.org. During installation, check the box to add Python to your PATH.

Step 2: Create a virtual environment

python -m venv regtech-env
source regtech-env/bin/activate  # On Windows: regtech-env\Scripts\activate

Step 3: Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

Step 4: Run your first example Navigate to any chapter's code/ directory and run:

python example-01-{name}.py

Recommended tools: - VS Code with the Python extension — free, widely used, excellent for beginners - Jupyter notebooks — good for exploratory work - PyCharm — more full-featured IDE for those who prefer it

A Note on Regulatory Jurisdiction

Examples and case studies in this book draw primarily from: - United Kingdom (FCA, PRA, BoE) - European Union (EBA, ESMA, ECB) - United States (SEC, CFTC, FinCEN, OCC, Federal Reserve) - Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia for APAC coverage

If you work primarily in one jurisdiction, the core concepts will translate even when specific regulatory references differ. Chapter 32 provides explicit comparative analysis across major jurisdictions.

Self-Assessment: Are You Ready?

Before beginning, can you answer these questions at a basic level? If not, the chapters noted will catch you up.

These are not entrance requirements — they are orientation points. The book will explain all of them. This list is simply to help you locate where foundational concepts are built.