By Marcus Littler, UK Partner, Cascade
The UK financial services sector is wrestling with a paradox: its ambition for global leadership is being quietly undermined by its own compliance burden. The recent report by TheCityUK and PwC laid bare the sheer scale of the problem, revealing that regulatory adherence is costing large UK firms over £33.9 billion annually. This is an eye-watering sum, representing more than 13 % of operating costs—money that is not being spent on innovation, product development, or client expansion. This financial cost, however, is merely the symptom of a much deeper, operational crisis. The industry must stop treating compliance as a cost centre and start defining it as a strategic lever for efficiency, competitiveness, and sustained growth.
The Operational Drag: Alert Fatigue and Data Silos
Looking beyond the financial spend, the biggest operational challenge the compliance burden creates is a state of perpetual strain, which directly prevents firms from moving forward with innovation. This strain manifests clearly in the excessive Alert and Case Volume within AML systems, which often generate a massive number of alerts, the majority of which do not indicate actual money laundering and are classified as false positives. This creates significant operational strain, leading to “alert fatigue” and the risk of genuine suspicious activities being missed.
The reliance on manual work further increases the likelihood of human error in data verification, risk assessment, and alert handling. Inconsistent application of procedures by different analysts can lead to missed red flags, allowing illicit activities to go undetected. Whilst teams often have technology at their disposal, the orchestration of processes across the client life cycle is largely manual, with spreadsheets and data silos poorly bridging the gaps.
Data Readiness is critically important here. Silos don’t just create manual work; the impact is that teams cannot fully leverage the data assets they currently have, especially if documentation is held across a number of silos, e.g., CRMs, spreadsheets, screening/monitoring tools, files, directories and databases. Compliance officers are experts in their fields but not in data. The evolving demands on modern compliance officers mean they are playing “catch up,” and that’s where companies like Cascade are adding value, working with both structured and unstructured data to ensure there is maximum use of assets across the CLM lifecycle.
In terms of Resourcing, every compliance officer we speak with is not just focusing on the day-to-day running of an overall CLM programme, but they are also working with external audit, regulators, and across multiple teams within the business, e.g., sales and client intake. In addition, there are constantly evolving regulations. For example, AMLA supervision in the EU starting January 2026, and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) becoming the Single Professional Services Supervisor (SPSS) in the UK, alongside Tranche 2 in Australia. Simply put, most compliance teams are working at maximum capacity. They want to find credible ways to adopt innovation without compromising on regulatory or client expectations. More firms are looking externally for advice and guidance in how they safely evolve and carefully adopt technology.
AI, Orchestration, and the Single Source of Truth
The strategic transformation from a reactive ‘cost’ into a proactive ‘strategic lever’ for efficiency begins with centralised, structured client and entity data. Organisations often rely on fragmented spreadsheets, manual data entry, and siloed systems that duplicate information and obscure risk. Cascade replaces these with a single, interconnected registry of clients, funds, entities, UBOs, and counterparties. Linked relationships and ownership structures are automatically mapped, ensuring consistency and eliminating manual reconciliation. This unified data foundation becomes a strategic asset: every compliance action—screening, monitoring, onboarding, reviews—feeds from and contributes to the same source of truth.
Building on this robust foundation, Cascade delivers AI-backed automation of end-to-end AML/KYC workflows. Client onboarding, risk scoring, document collection, screening, periodic reviews, and remediation are orchestrated through automated workflows that guide users and reduce manual interventions. Tasks that once required lengthy email exchanges, repetitive checking, or subjective judgment become standardised, timely, and predictable. This shift not only lowers the cost of compliance operations but also accelerates onboarding, allowing organisations to recognise revenue sooner.
Crucially, AI-powered continuous screening and real-time monitoring turn compliance into an anticipatory function. Instead of discovering issues during audits or retroactive reviews, the system flags risk changes, such as sanctions hits, adverse media, or shifts in ownership, in real time. Compliance teams can act early, reducing exposure and avoiding costly remediation exercises. Automated risk scoring further channels human attention to the most critical cases, increasing the strategic impact of limited compliance resources and significantly reducing false positives.
Another major driver for efficiency is auditability and data intelligence. Cascade logs every action automatically, producing defensible audit trails and regulator-ready evidence. Its built-in analytics, dashboards, and BI packages transform compliance data into management insights: time-to-onboard, alert volumes, review backlogs, risk concentrations, alert-to-resolution times, and staff utilisation. These metrics allow leaders to benchmark performance, identify bottlenecks, justify investments, and demonstrate operational resilience. Compliance becomes measurable, optimisable, and aligned with enterprise strategy.
In operational terms, the platform enables scalability without proportional headcount increases. Through cloud-native deployment, containerisation, and event-driven integrations, organisations can grow volumes of clients, transactions, and entities without multiplying human effort. This turns compliance into a lever of efficiency: cost per client drops, time-intensive processes are automated, and teams can focus on higher-value work such as enhanced due diligence or risk advisory.
Futureproofing for HNW Clients and Emerging Regulation
Regulatory adherence is of primary importance; firms have a reputation to protect. To ensure this, we are forensic in ensuring that a client’s regulatory commitments are met, and our platform has been designed with configurability in mind. This means that a firm’s unique processors, risk-based approach, risk appetite, and thresholds can be replicated in Cascade in line with their documented regulatory policies. Our company was founded by two former compliance officers, Maciej and Declan, who understood first-hand the importance of regulatory scrutiny running compliance operations in Luxembourg.
There is a misconception that strict regulatory adherence can stifle or limit the ability to innovate. The reality is rather the opposite: regulation drives firms to innovate; they have to remain competitive. If we think back to 15 years ago, a scanned passport and six-month-only utility bill would onboard an investor. Now multiple documents are required covering FATCA, ESG, W9-form (US), and UBO declarations, to mention just a few; however, the client expects the investor to expect smooth onboarding and limited outreach during the term of the commercial relationship.
At Cascade, we are always looking ahead into new regulations and the impact on both Cascade and our clients. When you design a CLM platform like Cascade which is serving multiple clients, often with multiple regulatory reporting lines including Luxembourg, UK, USA, Jersey, Guernsey and Ireland, you cannot fall into the trap it “ticks the box now” and think that’s okay—indeed, we see many clients who have tried to build systems and fallen into that pitfall. We recognise the trends in the way regulation evolves, and this is reflected in our platform in its configurability and its overall cloud-based data architecture, meaning any changes we want to make can quickly be deployed.
HNW and UHNW clients are lucrative investors for many of our clients and are fundamental to the success of the high-performing forms and assets which they service. We know their relationships teams spend months, sometimes years, developing trust before an initial investment is made. That trust is in part based on the fund’s or AIFM’s reputation, and Cascade is an important part of the narrative. HNW investors want to know that their investments (typically £1m+) are being carefully managed and that the firm has excellent policies, processes, and technology in place to ensure that success, including protecting reputations from an AML compliance perspective. With large investments often comes more paperwork (contracts, side notes, financials, etc.). HNW clients want the document management process from the outset at onboarding to be as smooth as possible and expect a high level of customer service. Capital is global in its nature; Cascade ensures firms can work with global HNW individuals and remain competitive in winning that business.
