In the tenth edition of the Nasdaq Global Compliance Survey, conducted in May–July 2025, compliance and regulatory-risk professionals from 103 firms across the Americas, EMEA and APAC shared their priorities, challenges and planned investments.
This year’s survey features a senior audience with 72 % having ten or more years’ experience in compliance covering director and above titles. Geographically, 46 % of respondents came from the Americas, 27 % from EMEA and 23 % from APAC.
This year’s findings highlight a number of directional changes over prior years. Reporting lines continue to evolve with the proportion of Heads of Compliance reporting into the Chief Risk Officer (CRO) rising to 33 %, significantly higher than the roughly 6 % reporting into the Chief Operations Officer. Compliance appears to be strengthening its presence at the executive table at 51%, up from 45 % in 2024.AI investment accelerates
One of the most striking directional shifts in this year’s survey is the planned increase in AI investment for compliance. Surveillance and monitoring are the leading use cases with more than 60 % of firms planning to add or scale AI-enabled capabilities in the next 12–24 months.
Commenting on this year’s results for RegTech Insight, Tony Sio, VP & Head of Regulatory Strategy and Innovation at Nasdaq noted, “What was exciting about this year’s survey results was the sheer acceleration in AI investment plans, 70 % of respondents expect to invest in AI over the next 12 months, nearly double the last expected adoption rate. While I anticipated continued momentum, the scale and urgency of this shift signal that AI is starting to become an operational imperative for compliance teams. The broadening participation from smaller firms and new sectors like crypto and energy also stood out, reflecting how compliance pressures are expanding well beyond traditional financial institutions. Overall, the findings were largely in line with the direction we’ve seen, but the pace and depth of change are striking.”Surveillance and Monitoring Lead Use Cases
When it comes to turning investment into practice, surveillance and monitoring are at the front of the queue. Sio continues, “Firms are starting to make great progress in translating AI investment into measurable compliance outcomes within surveillance and monitoring. In fact, this past week we held our global surveillance conference, where we heard from our client community about how they are thinking about and incorporating AI into their workflows and operating processes. The opportunity to harness technology is there, but the gap between technology availability and operationalization remains a key challenge. As AI capabilities mature, I expect to see more innovation in areas like false positive reduction and holistic risk management. In fact, based on the survey, 59 % of respondents cited surveillance and monitoring as their most mature automation use cases.”
Execution Challenges
While the enthusiasm for technology is evident, the survey reveals that the greatest challenge is no longer external regulation but internal execution. The most frequently cited obstacle is technology implementation and operationalisation (34 %). At the same time, data quality is the single most-cited high-priority area for the coming year (71.6 %), followed by surveillance effectiveness (61.5 %). Firms also report that reducing false positives has become more difficult with 35.3 % describing it as “extremely challenging”, up from 21.5 % in 2024.
Commenting on these findings and Nasdaq’s own experience in supporting client’s surveillance operations, Sio notes that “The survey highlights that operationalising new technology is the top challenge, outpacing concerns around regulatory change or fraud risk. We see this firsthand, as clients are looking to adopt advanced tools but integrating them into daily workflows and ensuring data quality can be complex. Building AI tools isn’t just about the capabilities. In a regulated environment like financial services, it’s equally important to have cybersecurity, robustness and non-discrimination as key aspects that need to be incorporated into AI tooling and strategy. It’s not just building AI within these parameters, as a highly regulated exchange, Nasdaq deeply understands the operational and compliance challenges our clients face. Ultimately, bridging the gap between investment and impact is where the industry’s focus must remain, and we remain committed to delivering resilient, transparent, and client-centric solutions that uphold market integrity.”
Broad modernisation and cross-product visibility
Modernisation is advancing on several fronts. Compliance functions are being repositioned within risk frameworks, cloud adoption is broadening yet uneven, and oversight models are expanding across products. While nearly a quarter of firms still operate without a cloud provider, AWS and Azure remain the dominant choices. At the same time, a third of firms have already embedded cross-product monitoring into live surveillance programmes, signalling a steady move toward more integrated and technology-enabled compliance operations.
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