Regulators and risk managers spur further adoption of AI solutions

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has announced an artificial intelligence task force to “enhance innovation and efficiency” across its operations.

According to the SEC press release, the goal of the task force is to drive the responsible use of AI by the commission.¹ The key objectives are to centralise and align AI initiatives throughout the commission and support innovation in the development of trustworthy and efficient AI solutions. The task force will also look at ways that AI can help to improve the accuracy and timeliness of the SEC’s regulatory and enforcement activities.

“The AI Task Force will empower staff across the SEC with AI-enabled tools and systems to responsibly augment the staff’s capacity, accelerate innovation, and enhance efficiency and accuracy,” said SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins. “By ingraining innovation into our culture SEC-wide, we will further our mission to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.”²

The growth in adoption of AI systems in the financial industry is spurring the SEC to look at the technology as both a potential aid to its own work and as a risk factor in areas it regulates. In February, the commission established a Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit to help protect retail investors and topping its priority list was “fraud committed using emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning”.³

The SEC’s use of AI for monitoring and regulation is likely to drive demand for AI-driven compliance platforms. AI offers the regulator new tools to keep up with increasingly complex financial markets that are expanding into digital assets, high-frequency and algorithmic trading. AI-powered systems can help monitor the millions of transactions per second involved in high-frequency trades for example.

Governance, risk and compliance teams turn to AI

As the commission looks to AI for real-time monitoring and predictive analytics to detect fraud and misconduct, financial firms are adopting AI for compliance and surveillance. The GRC Report’s 2025 Governance, Risk and Compliance Practitioner Survey signalled that AI was an emerging strategic priority for risk and compliance professionals.⁴ Nearly 14% of them have already integrated AI into their risk frameworks, and 43% more reported that they were actively evaluating AI solutions for fit and value.

A similar survey from Moody’s, with 600 professionals in various sectors and geographies (58% financial industry), showed that 53% of risk teams were actively using or trialling AI systems in 2025, in comparison to 30% in 2023.⁵ Fraud detection, transaction monitoring and risk identification were the areas experience the top impact from AI, followed by Know Your Customer (KYC) diligence and the automation of manual tasks.

In the GRC Report survey, professionals highlighted five critical areas where AI pilots or projects were being implemented:⁶

• Risk Monitoring and Reporting (48%)
  AI for real-time monitoring, from financial metrics to third-party data.
• Automating Compliance Workflows (43%)
  Automating controls monitoring, regulatory reporting, and audit documentation to keep up with fast-evolving regulation and compliance.
• Strengthening Threat Detection & Incident Response (38%)
  Advanced models sift through network logs and user-behaviour patterns in real time.
• Harnessing Predictive Analytics for Risk Identification (35%)
• Elevating Third-Party Risk Management (21%)
  Automating the analysis of vendor data, ESG disclosures, and even real-time news feeds.

However, risk professionals also highlighted challenges to using AI in their organisations:

• Integration with existing systems and workflows (48%)
  Legacy platforms and bespoke data models often lack the APIs or architecture needed for seamless AI ingestion, forcing teams into costly workarounds or data re-engineering.
• Lack of skilled talent to manage AI systems (46%)
  Organisations report acute shortages of professionals who combine deep technical know-how with GRC domain expertise.
• Regulatory uncertainty around AI usage (43%)
  With guidelines on AI explainability, accountability, and ethical use still evolving, compliance teams find themselves navigating a constantly shifting rulebook.
• Potential risks—e.g., cyberattacks, data exposure (40%)
  Misconfigured models or unsecured pipelines can become new attack vectors, propagating errors at machine speed and exposing sensitive data far more widely than manual processes ever could.
• Data quality and availability (37%)
  Incomplete, inconsistent, or siloed datasets undermine model accuracy and erode stakeholder trust.
• Ethical and bias concerns in AI algorithms (36%)
  Unvetted training data can bake in discriminatory patterns, skewing risk scores or decision-support outputs in ways that may run counter to an organisation’s compliance and inclusion goals.

In Moody’s report, the main concern was whether AI could deliver on its promise. While 84% of respondents said that AI offers significant advantages, only 30% reported seeing those benefits clearly.⁷ Despite this, 62% said that they expect widespread adoption of AI in risk and compliance within three years.

Moody’s said in its report: “The adoption of more bespoke AI models and tools that utilise machine learning, natural language processing, and agentic AI has increased, offering targeted and tailored ways to undertake many of the tasks risk and compliance teams perform. Agentic AI in particular is an area we expect to continue to grow as technology becomes more sophisticated and more repetitive processes in risk and compliance can be automated.”⁸

Parameta Solutions comprehensive surveillance dataset encompasses an institution’s order activity across TP ICAP’s trading venues and brokerage platforms, providing visibility for the full order lifecycle. Designed for flexibility, the data can be utilized independently or seamlessly integrated into existing surveillance systems to offer a unified view of individual trader actions, facilitating robust monitoring and analysis.
Find out more about how our surveillance offering can help here.