Financial services leaders are operating in an environment defined by relentless regulatory change, escalating data risks and heightened scrutiny around customer due diligence.
According to AscentAI, for heads of compliance, risk and operations, understanding how peer organisations are responding to these pressures is not simply a matter of curiosity – it is a benchmarking exercise that can inform strategic investment and operating models.
One of the most pressing challenges is the sheer growth in regulation since the 2008 financial crisis. The volume, complexity and pace of rule changes have expanded dramatically, driving up compliance costs across banks, insurers and broader FinTech firms.
Faced with this reality, many organisations are weighing two distinct approaches: increase headcount to manually process regulatory updates, or invest in RegTech infrastructure to automate and streamline compliance operations.
The traditional response has often been to hire additional compliance officers, consultants or external counsel to comb through lengthy regulatory texts and determine which obligations apply. While this may provide short-term relief, it is rarely scalable.
Adding more personnel does not reduce the regulatory burden itself; it simply spreads the workload temporarily while increasing fixed costs. As regulatory complexity continues to accelerate, that model can quickly become unsustainable.
By contrast, a growing number of peer firms are turning to RegTech solutions to digitise their compliance frameworks. Purpose-built platforms are now capable of reading, parsing and summarising millions of pages of regulatory material.
Tasks that once required hours of manual review – such as assessing the relevance of a 15-page rule and extracting specific obligations – can be completed in minutes. Beyond speed, automation reduces the risk of human error and frees up compliance professionals to focus on interpretation, strategic advice and risk mitigation rather than administrative processing.
Data privacy and cybersecurity represent a second major pressure point. As financial markets become increasingly digital, firms face mounting risks from cyber intrusion, data theft and operational disruption. Regulatory authorities have responded with detailed requirements around data governance, breach reporting and operational resilience.
Peers are addressing these risks in two complementary ways. First, they are strengthening internal expertise, recruiting specialists who understand both technological vulnerabilities and regulatory expectations. This often involves building robust control frameworks that clearly define responsibilities and escalation paths in the event of a breach.
Second, and increasingly critical, is the establishment of a central, enterprise-wide source of regulatory truth. Rather than allowing different departments to interpret rules in isolation, leading firms maintain a continually updated repository of obligations spanning multiple jurisdictions, from US regulations to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
This alignment ensures that security and compliance teams operate from the same reference point, avoiding duplication, over-implementation or “compliance overkill” where firms inadvertently exceed what is legally required.
Know your customer (KYC) remains the third cornerstone of modern compliance strategy. Anti-money laundering (AML) and anti-bribery regulations have made customer due diligence a central operational concern not only for financial institutions, but increasingly for large corporates with financialised activities. As global capital flows grow more complex, the risk of exposure to opaque ownership structures and illicit actors has intensified.
In response, many organisations are deploying specialised KYC RegTech tools that draw on extensive data sets to identify beneficial owners, analyse transaction histories and flag high-risk connections. However, technology alone is not sufficient. Effective onboarding now requires close coordination between onboarding, compliance and risk teams, supported by a unified regulatory framework.
The onboarding process itself has evolved from a one-off client assessment into an ongoing lifecycle activity incorporating continuous monitoring and real-time risk detection. Automation plays a crucial role in keeping firms up to date with evolving AML and KYC obligations across jurisdictions, helping to prevent the onboarding of suspect entities.
Where issues do arise, a centralised and well-documented compliance framework can provide evidence to regulators and investigators that appropriate controls were in place and aligned with current rules. In a climate of heightened enforcement, that demonstrable governance can be as important as the initial risk screening itself.
For financial services leaders, the lesson from peers is increasingly clear: scaling compliance through technology, centralised oversight and cross-functional alignment is becoming not just efficient, but essential.
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
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