Streamlining Compliance Tasks with AI and Automation

George Ralph of RFA discusses how financial firms can leverage AI to streamline and strengthen their compliance processes.

Financial firms manage large volumes of sensitive information, including user data from thousands - or even millions - of individuals. With this massive amount of data comes the responsibility to comply with various regulations across the industry and different regions. Without the right tools, maintaining compliance across all operations can become a challenging task for many firms. That’s where AI steps in.

By using AI, financial firms can streamline compliance with multiple laws without relying solely on manual processes - making the approach far more efficient. In today’s article, I’ll explain how financial firms can leverage different AI solutions to stay compliant and aligned with the regulations that govern their operations. Let’s kick things off by discussing the challenges of manual compliance.

The Challenges of Manual Compliance

Time-Consuming Documentation and Monitoring: Compliance teams often spend hours collecting data, updating spreadsheets, generating reports, and ensuring that all records are in place. Such repetitive tasks slow down operations and take time away from higher-value activities like strategy or risk analysis.
Human Error and Inconsistency: Manual processes increase the chances of mistakes such as missing a document, entering incorrect data, or using outdated templates. These errors can lead to failed audits or worse non-compliance penalties.
Struggles to Keep Up with Changing Regulations: Regulations like GDPR, SEC, and FINRA are always evolving as technologies change. Some of these are updated a couple of times every year. Keeping up manually means constantly reviewing laws, updating policies, and training teams, which is difficult and easy to overlook.
High Compliance Costs for Financial Firms: Financial firms spend significant amounts hiring compliance officers, legal consultants, and tech auditors. Manual processes add to the cost by requiring more hours and resources to stay compliant.
Lack of Real-Time Oversight: Manual systems rarely offer live visibility into compliance status. This means firms can only react after something goes wrong, such as during an audit or a data breach, instead of preventing issues early.
Poor Scalability: As a firm grows, so does the volume of compliance requirements. Manual workflows don’t scale well since they require more people, more time, and more resources, which can quickly become unmanageable and less feasible.

How Firms Can Use AI to Resolve the Challenges

Smart Document Analysis

AI tools powered by large language models (LLMs) can quickly scan thousands of pages across policies, contracts, and regulatory documents to find relevant information. This saves time since they can pull exact answers or data points needed by your compliance team. AI tools can also be prompted to explain complex sections, helping compliance teams understand tricky legal language without needing a lawyer for every detail.

Real-Time Monitoring for Compliance Violations

Instead of waiting for monthly reports or audits, AI tools can monitor systems, including on-premise and cloud environments in real time. They detect unusual behavior like unauthorized access, missing audit logs, or policy violations that could go unnoticed with manual systems. This allows the firms to take immediate action before small issues become big problems that could potentially lead to compliance penalties.

Automating Common Compliance Tasks

AI-driven platforms can handle repetitive compliance tasks, reducing the workload and human error while keeping records consistently up to date. Such tasks include

KYC/AML verification
Access control reviews
Logging incidents
Updating and versioning policies.

Intelligent Alerts for Risky Behavior

AI tools can flag risky transactions or non-compliant actions instantly without any manual intervention. For example an AI system integrated into your SIEM or Office 365 environment can alert your teams when someone tries to access a sensitive folder after working hours.

Such alerts can help compliance and IT teams respond faster before the issue escalates. For the best results, it’s important to use AI-powered compliance systems that integrate well with your firm’s operations and security tech stack.

Automated Completion of Compliance Documents

Filling out regulatory questionnaires or audit requests manually is time-consuming and prone to error. AI can extract relevant answers from your internal data and fill in these forms automatically and more accurately. This is especially helpful when firms must handle multiple questionnaires from different stakeholders such as investors, auditors, or regulators all at once. RFA developed an AI-powered DDQ tool that helps firms save time when filling out questionnaires. Let’s explore it in more detail in the next section.

RFA’s AI-Powered DDQ Tool: Real-World Application

RFA’s platform helps investment firms automate DDQ responses, which is one of the most time-consuming compliance tasks.

How it works:

Upload your DDQ: The AI scans the questions and finds answers from your existing documents (policies, procedures, reports), offering a personalised experience.
Stays within your systems: The platform runs entirely within your firm’s infrastructure, so no data leaves your environment. This is another crucial to ensure compliance.
Speeds up workflows: Saves hours (or days) by automating a manual process.
Improves accuracy: Responses are pulled directly from approved sources, reducing the chance of errors or inconsistencies.

Using RFA’s AI-powered DDQ tools results in less time spent chasing information, more consistent, accurate, and secure answers, allowing your team to focus on strategy and growth, not paperwork. Overall, this tool is something almost any financial firm needs because filling out these compliance documents is a common task.

Other AI Tools Used for Compliance

In addition to RFA’s AI-powered DDQ tools, other examples of AI-powered tools that you can use to ensure compliance include:

Microsoft Purview: It is a powerful tool for data governance and meeting compliance standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX. It uses AI to automatically classify sensitive data such as financial or personal info. It also helps you track where data is stored, how it moves, and who has access. Finally, it integrates well with Microsoft 365 and Azure, so you get visibility across your cloud apps, emails, and file systems.
LogicGate: LogicGate is a risk and compliance automation platform that uses AI to manage risk assessments, control testing, and issue tracking. With this tool, workflows can be customised to match your firm’s internal review processes. It also provides dashboards that help compliance teams spot risks early.
OneTrust: OneTrust is known for privacy and data compliance management. It uses AI to manage privacy requests, consent tracking, and third-party risk, helping your firm stay compliant with global privacy laws like GDPR, CCPA, and more. OneTrust is great for automating compliance audits and managing vendor risk.
AI Integrations in Microsoft 365 Copilot: Copilot uses AI to help compliance and legal teams find answers faster. Users can ask Copilot questions in plain English, and it scans documents, emails, and chats to pull relevant information, which helps reduce time spent reviewing policies, contracts, or past conversations. It is also good for quickly checking if you’re meeting internal compliance rules.

As I shared earlier, it is best to choose tools that integrate with the ecosystem of the apps you use in your productivity stack and security.

Final Thoughts

Overall, using AI to handle compliance tasks can be a game changer for financial firms. It helps save time and improves the accuracy of these processes. Tools like RFA’s AI-powered DDQ solution, Microsoft Purview, and Copilot are excellent options if you want to avoid wasting countless hours and resources on manual compliance work.

While these tools may have some costs, they are far less expensive than hiring large manual teams - or worse, paying penalties for non-compliance. So, make the smart choice for your firm.

If you need help integrating the tools we’ve mentioned, don’t hesitate to reach out - our RFA team is here to help.