2025 Compliance Trends List 

It’s the year 2025 and we’re all ready to see what’s coming this year. Just like last year, we’ve challenged our in-house compliance and regulations guru to peer into his magic 8 ball and offer up predictions that don’t look just like 2024’s trends.  

So here are the things you should be looking forward to (or avoiding: See last paragraph…) this year:   

1. AI regulation – The use cases are growing and evolving, but what we’re still not clear on is how regulators view them. From leaving the majority of governance to compliance teams based on rather vague recommendations, this year we’ll see global regulators and legislators more clearly defining what we consider AI and the standards for usage.  

2. AI and governance operations – As Spiderman says, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” We’ve got the power, now we need to define how responsibility works. This year teams will implement AI to become better and more operationalized from a governance, vetting and deployment perspective. This will be good as a lot of today’s hesitation with adoption ties back to a lack of standardization with how to properly onboard AI.   

3. Regulatory tension – A more business-friendly US administration will inspire regulators elsewhere, perhaps moving against previous decisions. Whether at the US state-level, or other global regulators, a counter push will have the effect of making a wash of regulatory under- and over-reach.  

4. Non-financial misconduct and ESG priorities muted – This past year we heard a lot about code of conduct compliance, but moving forward efforts at policing non-financial conduct may be relatively modest in comparison. Despite best efforts regulators will take a step back from explicitly attempting to affect company culture as a way to curb regulatory malfeasance. ESG-focused regulations will likely meet a similar, if more muted, fate.  

5. Crypto ascends – Much hay has already been made of how the next year will likely mark a legitimization of digital assets in the eyes of regulators. Less clear is what this will mean in practice and how this will translate to surveillance challenges. Crypto has its own language many surveillance vendors need to catch up on. Financial crime controls will be more relevant. It will be interesting to see how coverage adapts to new asset considerations. 

As a bonus prediction, I have this sinking feeling we’re going to see a big financial scandal. I’m talking something LIBOR-level, ENRON-like—a financial scandal that’s bold and bad and peels back the curtain on gaps that were in plain sight. Like the hundred-year floods our ancestors used to look to, I’m starting to fret on an impending scandal that will drop some time toward the end of the year…so stay compliant out there!