Innovation Keeps Expanding Compliance for Mid-Market Firms

What mid-market compliance function didn’t exist 10 years ago that now requires a dedicated staff? The simple answer is that it’s most of them.

Every major financial innovation from ACH to Swift, cards, cloud banking, open banking, real-time payments and now blockchain has ultimately reduced transaction friction while increasing enterprise compliance obligations. As a result, the enterprise compliance function today may be entering its fastest expansion since anti-money laundering (AML) modernization as it grows consistently alongside technological efficiency rather than despite it.

After all, the modern compliance organization did not emerge all at once. It accumulated one technological shift at a time. Electronic payments required new controls around authentication and settlement, while global banking networks expanded sanctions screening and correspondent banking oversight. Card networks institutionalized fraud monitoring and dispute management; and cloud infrastructure introduced cybersecurity governance, vendor risk management and operational resilience programs.

At the same time, application programming interfaces (APIs) have made financial data dramatically easier to share between institutions. The rise of APIs and embedded finance have also required entirely new approaches to customer consent, data governance, third-party risk management and privacy oversight.

Rather than replacing labor, financial innovation has repeatedly shifted labor from processing transactions toward validating them. Compliance, in other words, is no longer the cost of innovation. It has become part of the infrastructure that allows innovation to scale.

See more: Federal Approval No Longer Guarantees CFOs a Green Light

AI May Create Largest Compliance Expansion Yet

Large institutions and enterprises can absorb expanding compliance responsibilities by hiring specialists across legal, risk, cybersecurity and financial crime functions. Mid-market companies rarely have that luxury. But many of these firms now operate internationally, connect directly into banks through APIs, accept digital payments globally, deploy artificial intelligence (AI) internally and interact with real-time payment networks and embedded finance platforms that expose them to many of the same governance expectations facing much larger enterprises.

The compliance challenge therefore becomes organizational rather than regulatory. And the answer mid-market firms are turning to lies in embedding governance directly into enterprise technology rather than treating compliance as a separate downstream review process. Identity verification, transaction monitoring, policy enforcement, AI governance, vendor oversight and audit documentation are becoming features built into software platforms rather than activities performed manually after transactions occur.

“Most firms think AI is an efficiency upgrade, they think they will run the same processes with fewer people. We think that framing is wrong,” Madhu Nadig, co-founder and CTO at Flagright, told PYMNTS. “The firms that will win will rethink both how they apply AI to compliance technology and how they build a team around it.”

“We see the human role shifting from just processing alerts to more of an orchestrator, supervising the systems that do the processing and being there for escalations and more heavy-context work,” Nadig added. “The alert itself will become less central because the AI system can reason across behavior, context and history.”

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Smart Spending: How AI Is Transforming Financial Decision Making” found more than 80% of CFOs at large companies are either already using AI or considering adopting it.

But every enterprise AI investment typically requires parallel investments in cybersecurity, governance, privacy controls, legal review, model validation, audit readiness and regulatory compliance before organizations can confidently deploy systems into production.

See also: The 7 AI Terms Every CFO Needs to Understand

The Marketplace Is Moving Toward Compliance as Infrastructure

The next generation of enterprise software won’t compete solely on speed or automation. It will compete on how much governance comes built in.

History offers a remarkably consistent lesson around compliance and innovation. Every generation of financial innovation promises simplification. Every generation ultimately produces more sophisticated governance requirements. In the case of enterprise AI, for example, rather than reducing administrative work, AI increasingly redistributes it toward documentation, monitoring, validation and governance.

Research from PYMNTS Intelligence’s “The Enterprise AI Benchmark Report” shows that 71% of executives at companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue believe that organizational readiness is the chief limitation on AI performance. Only 11% said they think AI technology itself is the primary barrier.

Compliance therefore becomes less about monitoring payment rails and more about establishing trust across digital ecosystems. That trend is likely to intensify as AI agents increasingly begin interacting directly with financial systems.

Read more: The $100 Million CFO Rewrites the Rules on Legal Spend

Artificial intelligence doesn’t just create compliance work, it creates an entirely new layer of enterprise operating costs centered on governance. In a new PYMNTS eBook, executives from Visa, FIS, Synchrony, WEX, Billtrust, i2c, Thales, Velera, Bottomline and other industry leaders describe what they are learning as AI agents move from demonstrations into real operating environments.

“We see challenges around legacy ERP systems with limited AR API capabilities,” Michael Younkie, vice president of product management at Billtrust, told PYMNTS in January.

Research from PYMNTS Intelligence has shown that 83% of companies have yet to fully automate their accounts receivable operations, with data fragmentation a key culprit.

For all PYMNTS B2B coverage, subscribe to the daily B2B Newsletter.