Why Regulation Is a Secret Weapon for European Founders

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-10

When I joined N26 as CTO, my first real job had nothing to do with building an app. I was asked to help get a banking license and build a core banking system from scratch. I had never worked in finance and had never sat across from a regulator. For months, the work felt slow and heavy, full of requirements I didn't understand and couldn't shortcut. This, I thought, was the part of building in Europe that everyone had warned me about. I was wrong about what that experience was teaching me. ### The Real Lesson Hidden in the Rules A few years later, I built Vivy, a digital health platform handling sensitive medical data for dozens of insurers. Health data is about as regulated as it gets, and again my instinct was to treat the constraints as a tax on speed. Over time, I saw them differently. The rules were pushing us to build something genuinely hard to build, and even harder to copy: trust. Let me be honest about the cost, because pretending it doesn't exist helps no one. The 2024 Draghi report on European competitiveness found that more than 60% of EU companies see regulation as an obstacle to investment, and 55% of small and medium-sized companies name regulatory burden as their single biggest challenge. Fragmented rules across 27 member states, slow processes, and uneven enforcement are a real drag. Founders feel it every week. Anyone who tells you regulation is simply a gift has never tried to deliver under it. But the part that often gets missed is what those same constraints do to a company that takes them seriously. ### Why Trust Becomes Your Moat In most consumer software, the buyer mainly asks whether your product is good. In regulated markets like FinTech and HealthTech, the buyer carries a heavier question: Can they trust you with their customers' money or their patients' records? Will you still be standing, and compliant, in five years? A hospital, a bank, or an insurer buys that confidence as much as any feature. A startup that has absorbed the rules into how it builds takes that fear off the table. A faster competitor can't simply bolt that on later. That was the key lesson for me, and this is where Europe underrates itself. ### The American Speed Trap American startups are often admired for moving first and asking permission later. That works well until the product touches money, health, children, or critical infrastructure. Then the missing trust becomes very expensive. Consider 23andMe. The genetics company marketed health reports to consumers for years, but in 2013, the US Food and Drug Administration ordered it to stop selling them until it could prove the tests were valid. It pulled its health product for nearly two years to complete the regulatory work it had tried to skip. The cost? Millions in lost revenue and a shattered reputation. ### What European Founders Should Actually Do If you're building in Europe right now, here's my advice: - Embrace the rules as a design constraint, not a blocker. They force you to think deeply about security and compliance from day one. - Invest in compliance early. It's cheaper than fixing it later, and it builds a moat that's hard to replicate. - Remember that trust is transferable. Once you know how to ship a compliant product without losing your sanity, you can do it again in the next regulated category. ### The AI Opportunity The same argument is about to repeat itself with AI. The EU AI Act, the first comprehensive law of its kind, is being phased in over the next few years. The heaviest obligations land on high-risk uses in areas like hiring, finance, and health. I hear founders describe it the way I once described that banking license: a brake, a burden, a reason Europe will fall behind. I understand the frustration, but I'd ask them to look one step further. The companies that learn to build AI that is transparent, well-governed, and safe will win the regulated sectors where AI is audited and paid for. In AI too, trust is becoming the product. None of this means the rules should stay as they are. The Draghi report is right that the burden needs to fall, that rules should be simpler, and that enforcement should be consistent across the EU. But for founders willing to do the hard work, the payoff is real: a defensible business built on something no competitor can copy overnight.