Reducing financial compliance costs with scalable automation

Teams are burdened with constant rule tracking, fragmented reporting obligations, and data silos that slow response times and elevate risk. And, as evidenced by recent trends in our 2025 Compliant Communications report, many firms feel so burdened that they end up banning certain communication channels altogether, avoiding the associated financial compliance costs.

Exploring scalable automation will help directly address these challenges and lead to compliance cost reduction – empowering teams to overcome spending pains without exposing their firms to regulatory vulnerabilities.

Financial compliance costs are growing

Meeting the requirements of the SEC and FINRA demands significant resources and manual processes still leave many gaps, often in full view of the regulators. In 2024 alone, the SEC fined 26 firms nearly $63 million for failing to retain off-channel communications, while FINRA penalized Instinet $3.8 million for inaccurate manual trade reporting.

These cases underscore a hard truth: manual compliance is unsustainable. In combination with audits that are prolonged by messy and confusing data trails, the operational delays and their associated costs only compound the problem.

While firms are expanding their compliance teams in pursuit of covering more ground, it’s automated, scalable compliance solutions that can actually put an end to the constant bracing against penalties.

The problem with manual processes

Manual compliance workflows, such as data collection, monitoring, and reporting, remain a major driver of operational costs in financial services.

These processes demand extensive staff time and slow down regulatory reviews, creating dependence on specialized personnel to manage siloed sets of data. The risks are equally as significant: human error, reporting delays, and bottlenecks when critical knowledge resides with just a few staff members.

Although 75% of firms are using AI, only 34% actually know how it works – indicating that many are not making the most out of the automation available.

Therefore, manual processes still persist, particularly for off-channel communications and unstructured data, driving both cost and compliance risk.

A real-world example comes from 2020, when the Federal Reserve ordered Citigroup to overhaul its risk and compliance controls. Citigroup reported that outdated, manual reporting systems made compliance reviews labor-intensive and error-prone, leading the firm to commit over $1 billion to remediation.

Cost-effective compliance finance can reduce dependency on labor-intensive reviews, accelerating reporting, and ensuring accuracy, all at a lower operational cost.

How to scale compliance without stretching the budget

As financial institutions expand operations or adopt new communication channels such as instant messaging apps, compliance requirements grow exponentially.

Each new channel introduces additional data obligations. When managed manually, these expansions drive significant budget strain, reduce organizational agility, and increase the likelihood of compliance gaps.

But firms leveraging AI and systematic automation platforms can integrate new channels efficiently, ensuring comprehensive oversight without proportional increases in staffing. At a single cost, automation enables:

• real-time monitoring
• standardized reporting
• the elimination of human error

This enables growth while keeping compliance budgets under control, and more importantly, without increasing exposure to risk.

Here’s how:

1. Map out your regulatory obligations

Identify all of your current responsibilities as a compliance team, from SEC rules to FINRA obligations. If your firm operates across multiple jurisdictions, you’ll also have to consider any differences in global requirements and therefore, how your team must build out separate processes.

2. Audit your existing processes

Assess your current compliance workflows, data capture methods, and reporting cycles. There is a key opportunity here to highlight any overlapping processes that can be streamlined, as well as to eliminate any redundant systems.

3. Explore automation solutions

Consider the people hours required for each task and compare them to the cost and capabilities of regulatory intelligence platforms for compliance cost reduction. Then prioritize high-risk areas; those prone to errors, or that carry high penalty risks, such as off-channel communications monitoring.

4. Allocate resources, integrate systems, and train up staff

Automation is not the be-all and end-all – humans are still required to conduct many of these compliance platforms. During the onboarding process, for example, many of the tasks will involve aggregating the data from siloed channels into an integrated dashboard.

Staff will need proper training in order to maximise value from these systems and automate as much as possible. You may also have to select key personnel to maintain their specialized expertise for areas that automation cannot fully address.

5. Begin real-time compliance and optimize

Set up real-time alerts to track your compliance metrics and begin handling any suspicious alerts. Ensure that the systems are optimized as much as possible for your systems; refining the rules as you go. Help your stakeholders to realize the return on investment by quantifying metrics like ‘penalties avoided’ or ‘time saved’.

Reducing your compliance costs

The rising complexity of financial regulations and expanding communication channels has made compliance a costly and resource-intensive challenge. But transitioning towards an automated compliance platform can alleviate this pressure.

Lean on Global Relay to scale your automation. Streamline your communications data capture, monitoring and surveillance for comprehensive oversight and maintain regulatory compliance without doubling your team’s headcount.

Get in contact to talk through your requirements with a member of the team.

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