AI is rapidly moving from a promising experiment to a foundational capability within RegTech, forcing financial institutions to reassess how compliance teams operate and scale.
According to ComplyAdvantage, rather than triggering a wholesale replacement of people, the technology is reshaping how work is distributed between humans and machines.
The debate has shifted away from whether AI can do compliance work, towards how it can support professionals in making better, faster and more defensible decisions.
This evolving dynamic was a central theme at CATALYST 2025, where experts from Mollie, Monzo Bank, PwC and ComplyAdvantage explored the idea of AI as a “digital coworker”. The panel agreed that the future of financial integrity depends on human-led automation, where AI augments decision-making rather than displacing it. Used well, AI enables compliance teams to move from reactive, fragmented processes towards proactive and scalable financial crime prevention.
One of the clearest benefits discussed was AI’s ability to remove operational noise. Compliance costs have historically scaled in line with business growth, as more customers meant more alerts and more staff. AI disrupts that model by filtering repetitive, low-risk activity before it reaches human analysts.
Despite these efficiency gains, the panel was clear that empathy remains irreplaceably human. AI can identify typologies such as romance scams or vulnerable customer indicators with speed and consistency, but it cannot manage sensitive interactions with the care they require.
The rise of crime-as-a-service further reinforces the need for human judgement. Criminal toolkits are becoming cheaper and more accessible, with generative AI enabling scams to be translated and localised at scale.
Governance and accountability were also key themes, particularly as regulators adopt more enabling approaches. In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority has expanded initiatives such as live sandboxes, encouraging controlled experimentation. Even so, responsibility for decisions must remain human-led. Explainability, auditability and accountability cannot be delegated to machines. The panel compared AI agents to new employees, requiring oversight, performance monitoring and alignment with a firm’s risk appetite.
In this future, compliance teams orchestrate a constellation of technologies, using AI to surface the most critical risks while retaining ultimate responsibility for outcomes.
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