Compliance leaders across financial services are facing a familiar question: how are peer firms coping with today’s regulatory and operational pressures?
According to AscentAI, in an environment shaped by expanding rulebooks, stricter data privacy standards and increasingly complex Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements, benchmarking against industry peers has become more than a competitive instinct. It is a strategic necessity.
The regulatory burden has grown markedly since the 2008 financial crisis, with more rules, broader scope and faster change cycles. For many organisations, this has translated directly into rising compliance costs. Firms are effectively choosing between two paths: expand headcount to manage regulatory reviews manually, or invest in RegTech to digitise and automate the process.
Relying on additional staff and external advisers can offer short-term relief, but it rarely delivers long-term scalability. Reviewing large volumes of regulatory text to determine applicability and extract obligations is time-intensive and prone to human error. Adding more personnel does not reduce complexity; it simply spreads the workload, often at significant cost. Over time, regulatory change tends to outpace manual capacity.
By contrast, many peers are embedding RegTech into their compliance infrastructure. Purpose-built tools are capable of scanning, parsing and summarising vast volumes of regulatory material in minutes. A 15-page regulation that might require hours of manual review can be assessed rapidly, with key obligations identified and mapped to business impact. This automation allows compliance and risk professionals to redirect their focus towards higher-value, strategic oversight rather than document review. For firms seeking operational resilience, the time and cost efficiencies can be significant.
Data privacy and cyber security concerns represent a second major compliance challenge. As financial markets become more digital, the risk of data breaches, malicious intrusions and operational disruption continues to grow. Regulators have responded with increasingly prescriptive requirements around governance, controls and incident response.
Peers have addressed these pressures by investing in specialist expertise and robust internal procedures. However, effective data protection is not solely about technical controls. It also requires a clear, up-to-date understanding of regulatory obligations across jurisdictions. Leading firms are therefore adopting a centralised, enterprise-wide source of compliance truth. From US rules to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a unified repository ensures security, legal and compliance teams are aligned. This coordination reduces duplication, prevents over-engineering of controls and ensures that firms respond proportionately to relevant obligations rather than applying unnecessarily strict standards.
The third area of focus is KYC, shaped by global anti-money laundering (AML) and anti-bribery frameworks. As capital flows become more interconnected, the risk of exposure to bad actors has increased. This has driven widespread adoption of KYC-focused RegTech solutions.
Vendors such as Dunn & Bradstreet support compliance teams with extensive data sets designed to uncover beneficial ownership, suspicious transaction histories and opaque corporate structures. Yet even the most sophisticated point solutions benefit from integration into a broader compliance framework. A central, continually updated regulatory source helps onboarding and compliance teams coordinate efficiently, ensuring that identity verification processes align with the latest applicable rules.
Notably, regulatory expectations are no longer confined to traditional financial institutions. Large, financially active corporates are increasingly subject to AML and KYC obligations. As a result, onboarding has evolved from a one-off client assessment into a continuous, risk-based monitoring activity. Best practice now includes real-time risk detection and ongoing due diligence.
By automating regulatory updates and integrating them into internal policies and controls, firms can demonstrate that their compliance frameworks are robust and responsive. Should a suspect account slip through, a well-documented, centralised compliance system can show regulators that the organisation acted in line with all applicable requirements, rather than failing to meet them.
For compliance leaders, the lesson from peers is clear: scaling compliance in 2026 is less about adding headcount and more about embedding technology, alignment and continuous oversight into the fabric of the organisation.
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