How compliance leaders are deciding what AI can handle, what people still need to own, and what SEC and FINRA will expect them to prove

Description

For decades, compliance has been defined by its task list: reviews, attestations, filings, exam prep. Automation is about to take much of that work. What remains is the actual job at the heart of compliance, but what exactly is that job without endless filings and review? One possibility: compliance becomes to the firm what regulators are to markets, the owner of systemic integrity, setting standards and surfacing risk rather than processing transactions. Join compliance leaders as they discuss the possible futures of a compliance team freed from busywork: what an unburdened compliance team does that matters, which work the function can rightfully claim, and what to call the role it becomes.

Speakers

Colleen Graham

Chief Legal, Compliance, and Risk Officer, AlTi Tiedemann Global

Robert Ehrlich

Managing Director and Global Head of Compliance, Citi Private Bank and Wealth at Work

Robert Molinari

Chief Regulatory Affairs Officer and RIA CCO, Commonwealth Financial Network

Leonard DeFranco

Editorial Lead, Hadrius

Guided Questions

Colleen Graham

Your title already spans legal, compliance, and risk, which makes you a live experiment in what happens when the compliance seat absorbs adjacent ownership. As automation clears the routine work, which piece of the firm's integrity — culture, reputation, counterparty trust — should compliance formally own next?

Robert Molinari

Your role splits between running an RIA compliance program and shaping regulatory affairs, which is the difference between answering the regulator's questions and anticipating them. When automation frees your program from the reactive queue, how much of compliance's future value is in that anticipatory work, and what does building it actually require?

Robert Ehrlich

As someone who’s built compliance oversight into diverse and complex business functions across Citi’s businesses, how has automation changed the way you work? What advisory role do you think compliance should play beyond ensuring that oversight? Is there any aspect of firm health into which compliance has unique visibility that firm leadership should hear?

Leonard DeFranco

You spend your time getting compliance teams from interested in these automation tools to actually trusting them in the workflow. That gives you a view of where adoption stalls that the teams themselves might not name out loud. Across the firms you work with, what most often keeps a team from handing real work to automation, and is it the technology, the rules, or something about the people?