Compliance teams are drowning under an unprecedented tide of regulatory change, and the firms still relying on manual processes are carrying risk that compounds with every new market they enter.
According to research from RegTech firm Vixio, there were 247,500 regulatory updates globally in 2024, a figure that has likely only grown since. This sheer volume makes changes hard to track, and harder still to interpret, prioritise and act upon.
Vixio recently delved into regulatory change management, and best practices for compliance teams.
Regulators, meanwhile, increasingly expect firms to demonstrate a formal, repeatable process for managing regulatory change, rather than simply proving awareness of new rules.
The stakes are sector-specific but universally high. For gambling firms, regulatory complexity directly affects market access, licensing, certification and product launch timelines, where a single rule change in one jurisdiction can delay entry or block a feature.
For payments and financial institutions, the impact lands on licence conditions, AML obligations and external counsel costs, where a missed safeguarding update can trigger enforcement action or strain banking relationships.
The common failure points are familiar. Monitoring is often manual and person-dependent, meaning coverage gaps appear the moment a key employee goes on holiday or leaves. Triage is informal, with every update landing in the same inbox at the same priority.
Follow-up actions are scattered across email threads, Slack messages and spreadsheets, with no central record of ownership or deadlines. And when a regulator or auditor asks what the firm did about a specific change, evidence has to be reconstructed under pressure from fragmented sources.
Vixio recommends a five-stage framework to address this. First, monitor regulatory sources continuously across all operating jurisdictions, covering primary regulators, secondary agencies and local-language sources. Second, triage each update by urgency, classifying it as actionable, indicative or informative, a process AI and machine learning can accelerate.
Third, assess impact by extracting obligations from source legislation and comparing them against the firm’s current compliance position. Fourth, implement changes with clear ownership, deadlines and tracked progress, with each action linked back to the regulatory change that triggered it. Fifth, maintain a complete, timestamped audit trail from identification through to completion.
The company argues that a dedicated platform operationalises each stage. Its Horizon Scanning tool monitors more than 200 jurisdictions in real time, with updates assessed, tagged and summarised in English by specialist analysts, even when the source is published in Portuguese, German or Mandarin.
Its Smart Inbox automates triage, while Requirements Extraction and Gap Analysis surface precisely where a firm’s current setup falls short of incoming rules. Workflow Management then creates and tracks tasks directly from regulatory updates, building an audit trail automatically as teams work.
Customers already using the platform include Mindway AI, which replaced manual monitoring of multi-language regulator websites, and Bally’s, which deploys Vixio across 13 licensed jurisdictions. Bally’s team describes the platform as “the Bible” for keeping on top of regulatory developments, often delivering intelligence faster than external counsel.
The underlying message is stark: manual processes that worked across one or two jurisdictions become unsustainable at four or five. Firms that fail to formalise their approach risk turning compliance into the bottleneck for business growth, with expansion decisions delayed because teams cannot cope with the regulatory workload.
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