September 5, 2025
Financial compliance teams in APAC face continued regulatory pressure across employee conflicts of interest, anti-bribery and corruption (ABC), anti-money laundering (AML), sanctions monitoring, and more. While many financial firms’ operations are increasingly cross-border and data-driven, political volatility is also shifting enforcement priorities and widening FCPA exposure for firms with US operations.
Many compliance teams are running lean. At the same time, they are tasked with evidencing compliance across multiple markets and jurisdictions, monitoring potential conflicts of interest, keeping pace with regulatory change, and much more.
The MyComplianceOffice (MCO) APAC team recently held an informal event in Singapore, Compliance Over Coffee, where compliance and industry leaders came together to discuss the shifting sands of regulatory expectations across the APAC region. Several key challenges dominated the conversation.
Firms need a company-wide approach to conflicts of interest, with clear pre-clearance rules and a clean distinction between gift approval and expense reimbursement.
Siloed and disparate compliance systems can waste significant time and create blind spots, with Chief Compliance Officers (CCOs) seeking a unified, scalable system that can adapt quickly as regulations and internal policies evolve.
Traceability remains in the regulatory spotlight. When regulations change, compliance teams must show how obligations map to policies, controls, and risks.
AI is also an area worth exploring. It can accelerate surveillance and screening, but at the same time, human oversight is still essential.
Anti-bribery and corruption (ABC) and Anti-money laundering (AML) and sanctions controls must be holistic while adapting to the right fit for APAC firms. They need to support character-based screening, varied scripts, and end-to-end workflows with rules tailored by entity type, jurisdiction, and business line.
Read on to further explore the key themes from this discussion, practical steps to apply, and examples of how Regulatory Technology (RegTech) is helping compliance teams mitigate risk and stay ahead of evolving regulatory obligations.
Attendees compared notes on fragmented conflicts of interest practices. Different compliance teams are still using a variety of forms and thresholds, creating potential gaps in record keeping. Others have implemented bespoke solutions or are using MCO to address this issue. Throughout the conversation, it became clear that conflicts of interest must be treated as a firm-wide risk, requiring a focused approach to become truly effective. Firms should create a holistic conflicts of interest framework that covers disclosure, personal trade pre-clearance, employee activity monitoring (including eComms surveillance and archiving), and regular attestation.
Practical improvements: standardise the definitions of personal relationships, external roles, political donations, and personal account dealing. Set personal trading pre-clearance thresholds that are easy to understand. Make attestations periodic, and enforce consequences when not completed.
How RegTech helps: MCO’s Know Your Employee suite brings personal trading, outside business activities, gifts and entertainment, attestations, and registrations into a single compliance platform. Rules are configurable by entity and region, with each decision creating an audit trail. This consolidated approach gives compliance teams a single source to evidence compliance for regulators.
A recurring pain point was employee confusion between hospitality approval and expense reimbursement. Several leaders described staff assuming that if a receipt is reimbursed, the ethical questions have been answered. The consensus in the room was to separate processes. Require pre-clearance for anything that could influence a business decision. Reconcile the approved request against the final expense and record both.
Practical improvements: publish simple examples of what needs pre-clearance. Link your gifts policy to your conflicts framework. Reconcile expense data monthly and report outliers, repeated patterns, and missing post-event confirmations.
How RegTech helps: MCO’s Gifts and Entertainment module within the KYE suite supports pre-clearance, attestation, post-event confirmations, and automated reconciliations against declared thresholds. Exceptions route to the right approver and remain visible for audit.
Participants operating across APAC raised questions about US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act exposure, given a moving political backdrop and active cross-border cooperation. After pausing the FCPA in February 2025 pending new guidance on enforcement, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) issued new guidance on 09 June 2025. That new guidance focused enforcement toward cases that vindicate US interests, prioritising misconduct that harms US companies or limits their fair access to foreign markets.
APAC financial firms with any US ties should expect more targeted cross-border scrutiny and to recalibrate ABC controls and self-disclosure strategies. A comment that resonated was that FCPA risk is not limited to US subsidiaries. A wide range of US connections can trigger risk, including listings, bankers, investors, or third parties.
Practical improvements: refresh your anti-bribery risk assessment across third parties, markets, and government touchpoints. Provide training to frontline staff on facilitation payment rules, sponsorships, and charitable donations. Document the effectiveness of your compliance program, not just its design.
How RegTech helps: Third-party due diligence, conflicts registers, and gifts and entertainment controls provide consistent records across markets. Learn more about MCO’s Know Your Third Party suite that helps firms monitor and manage the risk that originates from customers, suppliers, related businesses, and third-party relationships.
Around the table, attendees touched on lean compliance teams covering many obligations. Manual trackers and email approvals seem to be soaking up hours. The group’s view placed a focus on standardised templates, automated routing, and clear service levels. Some already use dashboard views to triage and spend time where risk and volume meet.
Practical improvements: adopt firm-wide request forms for conflicts, gifts, outside roles, marketing reviews, and regulatory queries. Set routing rules and due dates. Publish simple SLAs so the business knows what to expect. Automate reminders and escalations.
How RegTech helps: role-based workflows and case management within a consolidated compliance platform, like MCO, can eliminate “swivel-chair compliance” and inbox juggling. “Bird’s-eye” view dashboards show workload by approver and entity, while audit trails evidence timely decisions.
Compliance leaders compared the hidden costs of multiple tools: duplicate data, inconsistent rules, and data gaps at hand-off points. A unified system is not just about convenience. It is, more importantly, about risk control. Where possible, bring employees, third parties, obligations, and policies into the one platform to clearly see relationships between otherwise disparate data and trends that can identify red flags.
Practical improvements: define a common taxonomy for risks, obligations, business units, and counterparties. Consolidate core workflows onto one platform where feasible. For specialised systems you must retain, integrate the data and agree on a single record of decision.
How RegTech helps: MCO’s complete compliance suite consolidates employee compliance, third-party oversight, policy governance, attestations, and much more. Shared data and consistent rules reduce manual effort and remove blind spots.
A major theme was traceability. Leaders want to show the linkage from a rule to a policy, to a control, to a test result. When a regulation changes, you should know which policies need adjustment, which controls need tuning, and who owns the change.
Practical improvements: maintain an obligations register with owners, effective dates, and related policies. Map each obligation to a control, a test plan, and a metric. Record the outcome of tests and remediation, then report quarterly to senior management.
How RegTech helps: MCO’s Policy Content Governor module lets you map rules to risks, controls, and policies, run gap analyses, and attest policy receipt for a complete audit trail.
The group’s question was direct. Can AI serve as the single source of truth in surveillance and screening, or does human intervention remain necessary? It is clear that AI can help with detection, prioritisation, and workflow. However, human contextual understanding, oversight, and accountability in decision-making processes are still required.
Practical improvements: define where and how AI is used within the firm, how models are trained, and how performance is measured. Maintain oversight to ensure decisions and rationales are explainable and accountable.
How RegTech helps: even when detection sits in specialist tools, MCO provides the governance layer, routing, attestations, and a durable system of record so you can evidence oversight and outcomes. Additionally, MCO’s eComms Review module combines machine-assisted detection with policy-based workflows, while eComms Archive preserves communications records with policy-based retention and granular search.
Attendees shared the burden of firefighting. The shift to proactive compliance requires clear indicators, regular testing, and concise reporting to the Board, committees, and senior management. When leaders understand the infrastructure and see performance reported in the same way each quarter, resourcing conversations can improve and potential issues can be addressed proactively.
Practical improvements: define key indicators for conflicts, gifts, training, attestations, third-party status, and other critical issues. Test controls on a cycle and track remediation to closure.
How RegTech helps: solutions like MCO provide configurable reports and dashboards that consolidate data from the same underlying records, giving a consistent view for management and regulators.
The final discussion topic focused on the diverse languages, region-specific vernacular, and character sets that APAC firms deal with. Screening and monitoring need local context, clear segmentation, and proper audit trails.
Practical improvements: segment customers and partners by risk, activity, and jurisdiction. Tailor rules by segment. Ensure screening supports local scripts and transliteration. Build end-to-end workflows with documented rationales for decisions and escalations.
How RegTech helps: MCO’s KYC and AML solution provides a complete compliance solution that supports character-based screening and end-to-end workflow management, with distinct rules and assessments for various entities, jurisdictions, and business verticals. Transaction Monitoring lets you integrate customer profiles, create customer segments and tune rules and limits per segment to reflect activity patterns. Partner Screening can be segmented by risk group, with configurable rules and filters, and screening rules can be adapted to local legal requirements as programs expand across jurisdictions.
Compliance leaders and teams in APAC need practical, effective ways to unify data, mitigate risk, build stronger frameworks, and confidently evidence compliance when regulatory inspections occur. RegTech solutions like MCO’s award-winning compliance management platform can help compliance teams of all sizes do the heavy lifting and free up time to focus on more strategic priorities. If it’s time for your firm to reduce the manual effort, improve oversight, and adapt quickly to evolving regulations, across jurisdictions then it’s also time to see MCO in action.
