Hassan Zebdeh, Financial Crime and Payment Advisor at Eastnets, outlines how banks can achieve stronger compliance outcomes by embracing more efficient, connected ways of working.
Compliance has become one of the most resource-intensive functions inside modern banks. Year after year, institutions invest more people, more technology and more time into meeting expanding regulatory expectations, yet many find themselves no closer to achieving meaningful reductions in risk. Or cost.
At the same time, financial crime is evolving daily, payments are moving in real time and regulators are increasingly focused on outcomes rather than process. While effort may increase, effectiveness doesn’t always follow suit. The systems and processes that once supported compliance in a pre-AI age are now being stretched to their limits, revealing a widening gap between what institutions put in and what they get back.
This growing imbalance raises a critical question for the industry: how financially sustainable is the current approach to compliance, and what needs to change if banks are to keep pace with risk and regulation?
The growing strain on compliance
Regulatory compliance can now account for more than 13% of operating costs, yet many banks continue to struggle with the same operational challenges. For most, rising spend has become the default setting for keeping up with regulatory obligations, rather than a reliable way to improve how risk is managed in practice.
Part of the challenge lies in how compliance has evolved. In recent years alone, banks have had to absorb a wave of new and evolving requirements – from the EU’s AML Package and DORA’s operational obligations to global FATCA/CRS reporting deadlines and many other regulations globally. The response to these changes has often involved layering new controls, systems and processes onto existing ones, adding complexity without fundamentally rethinking how compliance has changed.
The result is an environment that’s increasingly fragmented and difficult to scale. Compliance teams are expected to deliver faster detection, clearer auditability and stronger risk differentiation, while still relying on operating systems shaped by outdated processes and disconnected data. And yet, a single alert can take anywhere up to 22 hours to action – while some instant payments schemes require decisions in seconds, other nations still operate within minutes or longer. Sanctions lists are also changing, with the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposing sanctions on over 1,300 individuals and entities in 2025 alone, with this likely to double in 2026. Banks are having to manage risk continuously, even as they attempt to modernise operations that were never designed for today’s pace, landscape or scale.
Making matters harder, many firms are struggling to find and retain professionals with the right mix of legal, technical and operational expertise to work on these older platforms too. Experienced professionals are retiring en-masse, while nearly half of the new entrants lack the right experience needed to step into these roles effectively. Then again, why would the modern workforce want to work on outdated systems when they can choose new, more agile players within the industry?
Taken together, this all culminates into a costly endeavour. There is little being done on a broader scale to address the underlying mismatch between rising complexity and operational capacity. Therefore, to keep pace with risk and regulation, we need an entirely different approach; one that focuses more on how compliance is designed, connected and executed.
Reimagining compliance for a real-time world
For banks willing to rethink how compliance operates, this moment presents a clear opportunity to not only strengthen oversight, but to escape a cycle of rising cost and diminishing returns. As regulatory expectations rise and financial infrastructure accelerates, institutions have a chance to move beyond reactive expansion and build compliance frameworks that are both more effective and more economically sustainable.
An efficiency-driven compliance framework is central to breaking this cycle. Rather than increasing headcount or layering new processes each time risk or regulation evolves, the focus needs to be on improving how compliance work is performed. By reducing duplication and allowing better decision-making at scale, efficiency helps banks contain costs while improving outcomes, addressing the root cause of the compliance cost trap. The question becomes; how can organisations unlock these improvements? In practice, this shift is anchored in four core capabilities that together redefine modern compliance.
First, automation helps decouple compliance effectiveness from both headcount growth and large-scale system change. By streamlining the likes of data collection, enrichment and alert handling on top of existing environments, automation reduces manual effort without requiring a full ‘rip and replace’ approach of legacy platforms. This lowers the cost of day-to-day compliance activity while improving consistency and investigation speed.
Next, risk-based approaches make sure resources are applied where they make the most difference. In practice, this means deeper scrutiny for higher-risk customers, geographies or transaction patterns, while allowing faster, lighter-touch processing for low-risk activity. With AI models and agents, banks can learn from historical patterns, detect subtle anomalies and adapt to evolving fraud and financial crime typologies, using a risk-based approach to automatically reduce false positives. But by tailoring controls to actual exposure, institutions can improve outcomes while reducing unnecessary operational burden.
The third capability is streamlined reporting. This can be a time-consuming component of compliance, but automated, standardised reporting helps institutions meet regulatory obligations more efficiently, particularly across jurisdictions. By producing consistent, explainable and audit-ready outputs, financial institutions can reduce the recurring cost of manual reconciliation, remediation and regulatory engagement – all while strengthening compliance confidence.
Finally, interoperability underpins efficiency. Compliance systems rarely operate in isolation and replacing them outright is too costly and disruptive. Interoperable environments, however, allow institutions to modernise incrementally – connecting existing systems, eliminating duplication and extending the value of current investments – without downtime or operational risk.
Together, these four capabilities help shift compliance away from perpetual cost growth and toward a more stable, scalable model. Efficiency simply becomes the next frontier. Not as a shortcut, but as the mechanism through which banks strengthen defences, control costs and remain resilient in an increasingly demanding regulatory environment.
Escaping the cost trap
As regulation becomes more outcome-focused and financial crime continues to evolve, banks are being pushed to reconsider not how much they spend on compliance, but how effectively that investment is put to work.
Efficiency now represents the next frontier of compliance. And those institutions that rethink how compliance is designed, connected and scaled will be better positioned to strengthen defences, control cost growth and respond faster to change.
The opportunity ahead is to move compliance beyond perpetual expansion and toward purposeful design. For banks, regulators and the wider financial ecosystem, the objective is clear: build compliance frameworks that are fit for the future, resilient by default and capable of keeping pace with risk – all without letting cost become the limiting factor.
