SteelEye’s 2025 Compliance Health Check Report captures how firms responded to compliance pressures during 2024. A review of the same report for 2023 reveals a clear rebound in spending and technology adoption after a brief post-pandemic hiatus, yet it also underscores persistent gaps in manual work, channel coverage and enforcement readiness.
In the 2024 data (2025 report), 75 percent of firms increased their compliance budgets, with 25 percent calling the rise “significant.” Technology investment drove half of that growth, surpassing head-count expansions and regulatory-change costs. By contrast, the 2023 numbers (2024 report) showed just 69 percent of firms boosting spend – and only 15 percent recording a “significant” jump – reflecting a momentary belt-tightening in RegTech outlay. This year-on-year swing suggests boards regained confidence in tech-led compliance after testing the ROI of earlier digital projects.
AI moves from pilot to production
Adoption of AI in compliance accelerated markedly between 2023 and 2024. As of the 2025 survey, 68 percent of firms report live AI deployments in surveillance and alert-triage workflows, and 25 percent are actively investing with rollout planned. Crucially, 96 percent of those using AI live cite measurable efficiency gains. A year earlier, only 58 percent had crossed the production threshold, with a further one-third still in pilot or proof-of-concept mode, albeit reporting similar success rates on a smaller scale The net result: what was once an experimental frontier now underpins mission-critical compliance operations.Communications surveillance: plugging the gaps
Channel coverage has expanded, but not evenly. In 2024, monitoring of Microsoft Teams edged up to 53 percent, while WhatsApp climbed to 42 percent, up from 37 percent in 2023. Voice-call transcription sits at 58 percent, unchanged from the prior survey, yet 35 percent of firms still rely on manual sampling – an area regulators are scrutinizing closely. Mobile-device capture remains under-implemented: only 16 percent of firms in 2023 and marginally more in 2024 have built mobile voice pipelines. Neither year saw any firm monitoring more than three languages, highlighting a consistent blind spot in multi-lingual oversight.
Automation gains stall at the “last mile”
Despite sharper budgets and wider AI adoption, repetitive work persists. In both the 2023 and 2024 snapshots, 65 percent of compliance teams report spending more than 20 percent of staff hours on low-value tasks such as first-level alert review and data normalization. That near-identical figure shows that, while firms bought more automation tools, integrating them into daily workflows remains a challenge – often hindered by data-quality issues and legacy system debt.
Enforcement expectations ratchet higher
Regulatory pressure continues to mount. In the 2025 report’s reflection on 2024, 67 percent of respondents expect an increase in the number of record-keeping fines, and 71 percent foresee larger monetary penalties. Both metrics ticked up from 63 percent and 69 percent respectively in the 2023 outlook. Off-channel messaging remains a focal point: only 32 percent have fully implemented encrypted-chat monitoring, while 9 percent admit no policy changes – suggesting a cohort of laggards at heightened supervisory risk.Priority Playbook for 2025–26
The twin SteelEye Health Check surveys for 2023 and 2024 make one thing clear – compliance teams have identified their pain points, and they intend to address them with renewed focus and resources. From sharpening data and Management Information (MI) capabilities to embedding transparent AI, closing surveillance gaps, and streamlining technology stacks, these four priorities form the playbook that senior practitioners and RegTech vendors alike will be living by in the months ahead.
Data & MI Refinement: Nearly 29 percent of firms reported in the 2025 Health Check that they still cannot convert raw surveillance outputs into board-level MI, a hurdle that severely limits compliance functions’ ability to demonstrate risk exposure and decision-making rationale to senior stakeholders. Last year’s survey likewise flagged MI and data-quality challenges as a top concern, with respondents describing fragmented data sources and inconsistent metrics as blockers to clear reporting. In response, a growing number of firms are launching “golden-source” initiatives – centralizing trade, comms and alerts data into unified warehouses – and rolling out interactive MI dashboards that provide real-time, auditable views of key risk indicators.
Explainable AI to Reduce Alert Fatigue: False-positive alerts remain a major workload driver: 21 percent of firms in the 2025 survey cited them as their single biggest pain point, up only marginally from the prior year. While 96 percent of live AI adopters report efficiency gains overall, many still struggle to trust “black box” models that surface alerts without clear justifications. In 2023, survey participants were already calling for more transparent ML frameworks and decision-trace capabilities. Moving into 2025–26, compliance teams are evaluating AI solutions that embed explainability. Features such as model-agnostic feature attribution and natural-language alert summaries.
Closing Mobile & Multi-lingual Blind Spots: Mobile-device voice capture and multi-lingual surveillance consistently trailed desktop and fixed-line coverage in both reports. In the 2024 report, only 16 percent of firms had end-to-end mobile-voice pipelines, and no firm monitored more than three languages. The 2025 results showed only marginal improvement, with mobile capture still under-deployed and language support remaining static. Regulators have signalled zero tolerance for gaps in off-channel communications and non-English recordings, prompting firms to prioritize technical upgrades – such as cloud-native voice-capture agents for iOS/Android and multilingual NLP engines – to meet baseline compliance expectations.
Platform Consolidation & Integration: Both the 2024 and 2025 surveys identified integration friction across multiple point-solutions as a critical drag on compliance efficiency. In 2023, buyers complained of manual data hand-offs between specialist tools, a lack of consistent APIs and duplicated alert reviews. By 2024, more than half of respondents were exploring or piloting single-platform RegTech suites to reduce vendor sprawl and streamline their control frameworks. Over the next 12–18 months, firms will accelerate consolidation – either by selecting end-to-end surveillance platforms or by demanding modular offerings with robust integration toolkits – to eliminate operational silos and accelerate time-to-value.
The twin reports show that spending and AI adoption rebounded after a cautious 2023 cycle – but that compliance functions have yet to fully translate those investments into reduced manual effort and seamless channel coverage. For compliance executives, the challenge is clear – align 2025 budgets with measurable head-count relief and end-to-end record capture. For RegTech vendors, the mandate is equally clear – deliver plug-and-play, outcome-focused solutions that close persistent gaps in mobile, voice and multi-lingual surveillance.
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