Qomply Featured In FOW: Compliance Complexity in 2025

In the article, Stewart argues that compliance has shifted from a back-office cost centre to a core strategic challenge for buy-side firms in 2025, driven by increasingly complex and fragmented global regulations. Firms must navigate overlapping regimes like MiFID II and EMIR, each with highly detailed and divergent reporting requirements, while also managing data quality and interpretation challenges. This growing burden is not just technical but commercial: according to PwC research cited in the piece, 77% of firms say regulatory complexity is constraining growth.

A major pressure point is transaction reporting, which requires deep expertise across products, instruments, and jurisdictions. Many firms struggle to maintain this knowledge internally, especially given staff turnover and the loss of institutional memory. 

“The complexity comes from the fragmentation,” said Sophia Fulugunya, director of Transaction Reporting at Qomply and a former FCA regulator. “Mifid II alone has over 30,000 pages of regulation, guidelines, Q&A, and third-level material. Divergence between the EU and UK requires continual horizon scanning. Most firms don’t have the resources to manage internally, especially when their compliance teams are also responsible for other regulatory areas outside of transaction reporting. Transaction reporting is highly technical and requires a combination of instrument, product, trading and regulatory knowledge. All this requires an operational budget that leaves firms stretched or with severely weakened compliance strategies.”

As a result, buy-side firms are “rewiring” their compliance operating models, shifting away from manual, headcount-heavy approaches toward technology-enabled solutions and outsourcing. The article emphasizes that embedding technology improves visibility, efficiency, and risk management, with many firms already seeing productivity gains. Ultimately, compliance is being repositioned not just as a necessity, but as a strategic capability that can enhance resilience and support growth in a highly regulated environment.

Read the full article here.