Payments, financial services and gambling firms are grappling with an increasingly fragmented regulatory landscape, one that spans multiple jurisdictions, languages and formats, making manual tracking all but unmanageable once a business operates in more than one or two markets.
According to Vixio, a regulatory intelligence database aims to solve this problem by centralising laws, regulations and guidance from multiple sources into a single repository. But industry analysis suggests a database is only ever the starting point.
Once a change is identified, compliance teams still need to determine which requirements apply, what they mean for the business, and how to act on them.
The scale of the challenge is significant. A 30-person compliance team spending 25–40% of its time on regulatory monitoring, at an average FTE cost of £125,000–£135,000, could be spending between £940,000 and £1.6m a year on a task that automated solutions can complete in minutes. That cost grows further once a firm expands beyond one or two jurisdictions, as regulatory behaviours and publishing formats become far more varied.
The gambling sector illustrates just how quickly rules can shift. Brazil only opened its regulated online gambling market in 2025, yet operators have already faced a tax increase, with lawmakers signalling interest in raising it further.
Outsourcing horizon scanning to local lawyers and consultants has traditionally filled the gap, but this approach often produces a single report every 90 days, leaving compliance teams to sift through lengthy documents and coordinate their own response. If a regulatory change occurs between reporting cycles, firms may not learn of it for weeks, cutting into the time available to assess impact and act.
Automated platforms are increasingly positioned as the more practical alternative, continuously monitoring regulatory sources, standardising information regardless of language or format, and issuing real-time alerts. Vixio, for example, offers a database covering original legal and regulatory documents from more than 200 jurisdictions, alongside an Obligations Library that links extracted requirements to a firm’s internal controls and workflow tools.
Industry guidance suggests firms evaluating such platforms should prioritise industry-specific expertise, relevant jurisdictional coverage, intuitive organisation, real-time horizon scanning, expert validation of AI-flagged updates, and full source traceability, rather than being swayed by vendors touting the largest jurisdiction counts alone.
Read the full Vixio post here.
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