Payments and gambling firms are haemorrhaging money on regulatory monitoring, with some compliance teams spending up to 40% of their time simply checking whether rules have changed, rather than acting on them.
According to Vixio, the problem stems from fragmentation. Regulatory information is scattered across regulators, ministries, government portals and industry notices, published in different languages and formats with no consistent schedule.
For a 30-person compliance team earning an average FTE cost of £125k-£135k, spending a quarter to nearly half their time on monitoring alone could mean an annual bill of between £940k and £1.6m, for a task automation could complete in minutes.
The difficulty compounds as firms expand. Tracking one or two jurisdictions manually is manageable, but a third or fourth market pushes workloads beyond what most teams expect, particularly for B2B gambling suppliers operating across dozens of markets with lean compliance functions. Smaller teams remain accountable for spotting how regulatory shifts affect their products, even when a quieter update from a lesser-known authority is easy to miss.
Regulation itself shows no sign of slowing down. The gambling sector has proven especially volatile, driven by shifting political attitudes and emerging technologies. Brazil’s regulated online gambling market only launched in 2025, yet operators have already absorbed a tax rise, with further increases reportedly under consideration.
Traditional fixes, such as outsourcing horizon-scanning to local lawyers, are not solving the efficiency problem either. Reports typically land every 90 days, leaving compliance teams to sift through dense PDFs and work out the implications themselves. Any change occurring between cycles risks going unnoticed for weeks, shrinking the window to respond, while costs climb as firms enter more markets.
Automated regulatory intelligence databases are emerging as the more practical alternative, continuously scanning thousands of sources, standardising updates regardless of format or language, and flagging early signals such as consultations and enforcement action before rules take effect.
But a database alone isn’t the full answer. Firms should also weigh industry focus, jurisdictional relevance, intuitive organisation, real-time horizon scanning and, critically, expert validation, since AI-driven tools still carry a margin for error that high-stakes compliance decisions cannot absorb.
Source traceability rounds out the checklist: every alert should link back to the original legal text, ensuring compliance actions can be justified and audited. As one example in the space, Vixio’s platform pairs its database with an Obligations Library, tying extracted requirements to internal controls and enabling teams to convert obligations directly into actionable tasks.
Read the full Vixio post here.
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