The Clearing House, an advocacy group owned by the world’s largest commercial banks, has its gun sights on payment startups. It's a sign the incumbents wont stand idly by while start-ups break the rules. We encourage our CEO's to build compliance into the fabric of their company - remember, if you start to look like and smell like a financial institution, you will get regulated like one, so best to prepare upfront..
Factoring nimble compliance into product design will attract savvy investors and, perhaps more importantly, smooth entry into established markets. Failure to take this approach can be crippling or even fatal. It’s a near certainty, for example, that the recent FinCEN action against Ripple Labs scared away plenty of good money. Startups that cross regulators are vulnerable to similarly damaging enforcement actions. But even those companies that avoid the doomsday scenario risk being victims of their own success.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/01/why-startups-should-leverage-compliance/