FF News Tattoo Studio: Alloy’s Playbook for Scaling Compliance in Fintech

At the FF News Tattoo Studio at Fintech Talents Festival 2025, Sacha Waters from Alloy talks about her route into RegTech, why she cares so much about compliance, and what it’s like building a UK sales function from scratch.

Waters explains that she works in Alloy’s European sales team and was the company’s first sales hire in the UK. Alloy is a US-based regtech firm helping financial institutions manage KYC and KYB through an orchestration layer rather than a single-vendor approach. She jokes that RegTech is the “sexy version of fintech,” and describes the appeal of joining a small local team backed by a large, well-funded US “mothership” with the freedom of a two-person WeWork setup with the stability, budget and backing of a billion-dollar company.

Her decision to join Alloy was shaped by hard lessons at Crowdcube, the equity crowdfunding platform where she previously worked. As Crowdcube expanded into Europe, KYC and KYB were treated as an afterthought, which caused real problems in early funding rounds. When she left, Waters asked herself what had genuinely held them back and the answer was compliance. Looking into RegTech, she realised the real need was for a holistic orchestration solution rather than a single IDV or KYB provider when a mentor then pointed her to Alloy, just as they were hiring in the UK, giving her the chance to help build something from the ground up.

Waters says this lived experience is what makes her effective in sales as she’s felt the real-world pain of getting compliance wrong, the awkward conversations, the late-night calls when you’d rather be on the sofa with a glass of wine than firefighting onboarding failures. That gives her credibility and empathy when talking to clients: she’s not just selling a tool, she’s trying to help them avoid scenarios she knows all too well.

She also highlights Alloy’s culture and the autonomy given to the UK team. The company initially tried running UK and European sales from the US with only moderate success and the pivot was to “UK everything”: hire local reps, trust them to learn, and let them experiment. Waters has leaned into that freedom with an eclectic LinkedIn presence and unconventional marketing tactics, plus a very direct sales style, she’s happy to walk up to people and simply ask if they need a KYC solution. The interview wraps with Waters acknowledging that it’s unusual to be passionate about KYC and orchestration, but for her it’s about something bigger: enabling more people to access financial services safely and smoothly.

With Sacha Waters Alloy RegTech Sales strategy rooted in real-world experience and transparent conversations, the mission is clear: help firms scale safely, without losing sleep over compliance.