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In an environment of changing regulations and new technology, companies face growing costs and complexity in meeting their compliance requirements. PwC’s Global Compliance Survey 2025 captures the perspectives of more than 1,800 business, compliance and risk leaders across 63 territories. It found that 85% of respondents felt compliance requirements have become more complex over the past three years. What’s more, 82% said that this complexity has had a negative impact on business transformation and change (the third-most widely cited consequence among the 11 in the analysis).
Yet a subset of leading companies—the survey’s ‘compliance pioneers’—are adopting new approaches to manage compliance requirements more effectively. Rather than simply adding more people and more controls, compliance leaders at these companies are rethinking their processes, embracing technology and becoming more strategic in how they help leadership see, take and manage risk. They are moving beyond their traditional mandate of protecting the organisation to also capture the potential upside of risk and support transformation that helps create value.
Currently, only 7% of respondents consider their company to be an industry leader in compliance. If you would like to style your company as a compliance leader, too, these four practices—currently employed by compliance pioneers—are a good place to start.
- Offer proactive advice across the organisation, and do it more often. For example, advise leaders and those in frontline functions on how they can optimise and build compliance checks into business processes and strategic initiatives.
- Involve compliance earlier in the development of new products and services—to ensure that designs meet existing or forthcoming requirements and standards, and to avoid costly redesigns or delays downstream. Companies with a stronger compliance culture are more likely to be involved at the pre-development/concept stage versus those with a poorer compliance culture (58% versus 34%).
- Invest in technology to automate compliance. Solutions are available that can help companies consolidate and use data more effectively—for example, by running transaction monitoring and visualisation to spot issues earlier. Leading companies reported real benefits to embracing automation technology, including faster identification of and response to compliance issues (53% of respondents), higher quality/more insightful reporting (48%), faster/more confident decision-making (46%) and increased productivity, efficiencies and cost savings (43%).
- Use AI to enhance and optimise multiple areas of compliance—for example, by supercharging predictive analytics to anticipate emerging risks and detect fraud, and to support more precise and dynamic risk-assessment approaches. Eighty-eight percent of those in the survey’s pioneer group use AI across multiple areas and recognise the technology as a net benefit.
By shifting their mindset—and emphasising new technology and talent—compliance pioneers are helping their companies to move faster, reinvent business models, avoid hazards and build trust.
Explore the full findings of PwC’s Global Compliance Survey 2025
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