2025 has been an important year for global compliance, with regulators increasing expectations across a range of fronts and has forced firms to rethink what “good” looks like in governance, surveillance and technology.
In its report, The next chapter of compliance, Star Compliance’s Quarterly Executive Brief takes a look at the most consequential regulatory developments of 2025 and outlines what compliance leaders should prioritise in 2026 as oversight intensifies across the world.
A main theme in the report is that digital assets and tokenisation have moved decisively into the regulatory mainstream. The report points to rising expectations around accountability regimes, with upcoming reforms to the UK’s Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SMCR) remaining a key issue even amid uncertainty around timing and scope.
Market-abuse supervision is another area that Star Compliance highlights as tightening, particularly through a renewed focus on shadow trading. The Quarterly Executive Brief notes that regulators are broadening how they interpret insider-trading risk, reflecting a supervisory shift towards behaviours that exploit informational advantages even when classic definitions of inside information are harder to prove.
For compliance leaders, the message is that surveillance programmes may need to expand beyond traditional alerts and scenarios, and that policies should reflect a wider understanding of how suspicious trading activity can manifest.
The report identifies a set of trends likely to shape 2026, including a shift towards unified compliance platforms, the growing importance of real-time analytics, and deeper integration of compliance tooling across the enterprise.
The implication is that fragmented point solutions will struggle to keep pace with the speed of regulatory change and the demand for consistent controls across business lines and geographies.
The brief sets out why firms should apply the same conduct and surveillance standards to digital assets as they do to traditional securities, what potential SMCR reforms could mean in practice, and how regulators are widening the lens on insider-trading risk through shadow trading. It also highlights the RegTech trends shaping 2026, including unified compliance platforms, real-time analytics and tighter integration across the enterprise.
Download the full report here.
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