Compliance teams heading into 2027 budget season face a harder question than usual: not whether to renew existing tools, but whether those tools can keep up with how employees now trade. Material non-public information (MNPI) is no longer confined to traditional securities.
Staff can act on it through crypto and digital assets, tokenised real-world assets, and prediction markets, alongside conventional shadow trading in economically linked companies. The sensitivity of the information does not change just because the instrument used to exploit it does.
StarCompliance argues that managing this risk requires more than monitoring transactions or asset classes in isolation. Firms need to connect employee activity, MNPI, market data and conflicts of interest to see the relationships between them, an approach the RegTech vendor calls “Compliance, Connected.”
The company frames this as central to any 2027 technology conversation, with the real test being whether a platform can link activity across traditional and emerging markets rather than simply flag trades within a single asset class.
To help compliance leaders assess readiness, StarCompliance poses six questions for budget planning, covering monitoring across asset classes, connecting MNPI to personal trading, uncovering hidden risk relationships, adapting to regulatory change, cutting manual processes, and generating actionable analytics. A “no” to any of these, the firm suggests, should trigger investment before a risk materialises rather than after.
Findings from StarCompliance’s 2026 Global Compliance Benchmark Study, drawn from over 300 compliance, risk and technology professionals, underline the gap between intent and readiness.
The research found that 76% of firms have increased compliance budgets, 67% are deploying or piloting AI, and 40% identified digital assets and crypto as the area where they feel least prepared. Note: the original source did not include any directly quoted statements from company executives.
StarCompliance’s broader argument is that legacy systems carry a hidden cost beyond their sticker price. Manual processes and ageing infrastructure demand internal resources for maintenance, remediation and updates, resources that could otherwise support investigations and emerging-risk work.
As new markets and rules continue to emerge, the firm suggests treating compliance technology not as a fixed operating expense but as an investment in oversight, efficiency, and adaptability heading into 2027.
StarCompliance’s full post can be read here.
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