Building a Business Case for Modern Compliance
Budgeting for 2027: Is Your Compliance Platform Keeping Pace with the Markets?
Budget season is an opportunity to look beyond what your compliance program needs today and ask a more important question: Will it be equipped for the risks your firm faces tomorrow?
As new ways to trade and potentially act on material non-public information (MNPI) emerge, compliance leaders need to ensure their technology and budgets, are keeping pace.
Financial markets are evolving quickly. Employees can access more asset classes, trading venues, and ways to express wealth. Traditional securities now sit alongside crypto and digital assets, tokenized real-world assets, and increasingly popular prediction markets.
For compliance leaders planning for 2027, this should change the conversation around technology investment.
MNPI Is Asset Agnostic
Material non-public information does not become less sensitive because someone chooses to act on it outside a traditional securities trade.
An employee with privileged information could potentially seek to benefit through a related security, digital asset, tokenized instrument, or prediction market tied to the outcome of an event. Shadow trading further expands the potential risk by raising questions about trading in economically related companies or assets.
The common denominator is the information.
Managing risk requires more than monitoring individual transactions or asset classes alone. Firms need the ability to connect employee activity, MNPI, market data, conflicts, and other risk signals to understand the relationships between them.
At StarCompliance (Star), we call this Compliance, Connected: an approach that brings together people, processes, technology, and data to break down silos and provide a more complete view of employee and firm conduct. When information is connected across compliance functions, teams can uncover relationships that might otherwise go unseen, turn data into actionable intelligence, and identify emerging risks earlier.
As firms plan for 2027, that connectivity should be central to the technology conversation. The question is no longer simply whether a platform can monitor a particular type of trading, but whether it can connect activity across traditional and emerging markets with the information and context needed to understand potential risk.
Make 2027 the Year to Assess Your Technology
Budgeting for compliance technology should not simply mean renewing what you already have. It is an opportunity to determine whether your current platform can keep pace with the business, regulatory expectations, and new forms of employee trading.
Compliance leaders should be asking:
- Can we monitor employee activity across traditional and emerging asset classes?
- Can we connect MNPI with personal trading and other potential conflicts?
- Can our data help uncover relationships and risks that might otherwise go unseen?
- Can our technology adapt as regulations, markets, and business requirements change?
- Are manual processes consuming resources that could be focused on higher-value risk management?
- Do we have the reporting and analytics needed to turn compliance data into actionable intelligence?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, 2027 budget planning is the time to address it, not after a risk has materialized.
What the Industry Is Telling Us
Star’s 2026 Global Compliance Benchmark Study, based on insights from more than 300 compliance, risk, and technology professionals, demonstrates how quickly priorities are shifting. Among the findings:
- 76% reported increased compliance budgets
- 67% are deploying or piloting AI
- 40% identified digital assets and crypto as the area for which they are least prepared.
The findings point to an industry that recognizes the need to evolve, but where investment and readiness don’t always move at the same pace. As compliance leaders build the business case for 2027 resources, understanding where peers are investing and where gaps remain can provide valuable context.
Download the 2026 Global Compliance Benchmark Study [HERE] to explore the findings and see how your priorities compare with industry peers.
Budget for the Risk You’re Becoming, Not Just the Risk You Know
The case for modernizing compliance technology is not simply about adding another tool. It is about creating the connectivity, visibility, and intelligence needed to understand risk as markets become more complex.
Bringing together personal account dealing, digital asset and crypto monitoring, prediction market activity, MNPI management, conflicts of interest, market data, and analytics can provide a more complete picture of employee conduct and help compliance teams identify potential risks earlier.
Standing still also has a cost. Legacy technology and manual processes require internal resources to maintain, remediate, and update. As new markets and regulations emerge, those demands can grow, taking time away from investigations, emerging risks, regulatory change, and supporting the business.
That makes the ROI conversation about more than the initial cost of technology. Firms should consider the resources required to develop, test, maintain, support, and continually update their systems, as well as potential remediation costs and reliance on external legal, consulting, and technology expertise when gaps emerge.
As firms establish their 2027 budgets, view compliance technology not simply as an operating expense, but as an investment in stronger oversight, greater efficiency, better decision-making, and the ability to adapt.
Start the 2027 Conversation Now
Markets will continue to innovate. New ways to trade will emerge. Regulatory expectations will evolve. But the main responsibility to protect MNPI and identify potential conflicts will remain.
The question for compliance leaders isn’t whether their programs will need to change. It’s whether they have allocated the resources to change with them.
Now is the time to assess your compliance platform, identify potential gaps, and make sure your 2027 budget gives your team the technology, data, connectivity, and visibility it needs to manage what comes next.
Ready to assess your compliance technology strategy for 2027? Connect with Star [HERE] to explore how a Compliance, Connected approach can help strengthen oversight across traditional and emerging markets.
