--- title: "The Compliance Excuse: What's Actually Blocking AI in Fund Operations | Next Matter" description: "Compliance isn't blocking AI in fund operations. It's correctly identifying that the underlying process was never governed well enough to add AI to. The real diagnosis, and the fix." lang: en json-ld: | [ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "Organization", "@id": "https://nextmatter.com/#organization", "name": "Next Matter", "legalName": "Daizy NM Limited", "url": "https://nextmatter.com", "logo": "https://nextmatter.com/__l5e/assets-v1/aab354c2-e169-46fe-8e9b-0e78438471d3/nextmatter-logo.svg", "description": "Next Matter is the orchestration platform for regulated financial operations - purpose-built for asset managers, fund administrators, and wealth and wealthtech firms, not a generic workflow tool - combining AI agents, your existing systems and human approvals with governance and a complete audit trail.", "sameAs": [ "https://www.linkedin.com/company/nextmatter", "https://www.daizy.com" ] }, { "@type": "WebSite", "@id": "https://nextmatter.com/#website", "url": "https://nextmatter.com", "name": "Next Matter", "publisher": { "@id": "https://nextmatter.com/#organization" }, "inLanguage": "en" } ] }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Article", "headline": "The Compliance Excuse: What's Actually Blocking AI in Fund Operations", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Jonty Hurwitz", "jobTitle": "Founder" }, "publisher": { "@id": "https://nextmatter.com/#organization" }, "datePublished": "2026-08-20", "mainEntityOfPage": "https://nextmatter.com/opinions/compliance-excuse", "inLanguage": "en" }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://nextmatter.com" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Opinions", "item": "https://nextmatter.com/opinions" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "The Compliance Excuse", "item": "https://nextmatter.com/opinions/compliance-excuse" } ] } ] } ] --- [![Next Matter Logo](/__l5e/assets-v1/aab354c2-e169-46fe-8e9b-0e78438471d3/nextmatter-logo.svg)](/) - [Solutions](/solutions) [ grid\_view Solutions Overview Personas, capabilities, and proof ](/solutions)[ smart\_toy AI Orchestration Coordinate agents across your stack ](/solutions/ai-orchestration)[ library\_books Workflow Library Remix production-ready workflows ](/remix) Case Studies [ ![Ocorian](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/69a7f71677d8045f0f2d982a/69a7f71677d8045f0f2da4e8_Ocorian_trustbar.svg) Ocorian 1,800 Employees • Fund Administrator ](/case-studies/ocorian)[ ![Trade Republic](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/69a7f71677d8045f0f2d982a/69a7f71677d8045f0f2da4e9_traderpublic_trustbar.svg) Trade Republic 10M Customers • Online Trading Platform ](/case-studies/trade-republic)[ ![b2Venture](/__l5e/assets-v1/40232f5e-b66d-45f6-8d04-8be40304d172/b2venture-logo.png) b2Venture $800mn AUM • Venture Capital Firm ](/case-studies/b2venture)[ ![Swan](/__l5e/assets-v1/ef4919d4-3042-430f-b1a2-10b7da14c889/swan-logo.webp#lh=1500x401) Swan BaaS leader • Embedded Banking Platform ](/case-studies/swan) - [Platform](/platform) [ hub Platform Overview Built for Fund Operations ](/platform)[ build Workflow Builder Build long-running orchestrations ](/workflow-builder)[ smart\_toy AI & Automation Agents, models and guardrails ](/ai-and-automation)[ extension Integrations Core Ledger & Ecosystem Connectivity ](/integrations)[ verified\_user Governance & Audit Approvals and a full audit trail ](/governance-and-audit)[ shield Security SOC 2, data residency ](/security) - Resources [ forum Ask a Technical Question Chat with the docs AI assistant ](https://help.nextmatter.com/docs/integrate-across-tools?assistant)[ campaign Opinions Perspectives from our team ](/opinions) [Sign in](https://app.nextmatter.com/login) [Apply](/book-a-demo) [Home](/) chevron\_right [Opinions](/opinions) chevron\_right The compliance excuse Opinion · AI governance # The compliance excuse: what's actually blocking AI in fund operations "Compliance won't let us" is the most common explanation for a stalled AI programme. It is almost never the real one. volume\_up Listen to this piece [menu\_book Start reading](#article) ![Jonty Hurwitz](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/69a7f71677d8045f0f2d982a/69b9321a07c5323a0c817c07_Jonty.png) Written by Jonty Hurwitz Founder Read time 8 min Published Aug 2026 E very stalled AI programme in financial operations has the same sentence attached to it. The pilot worked. The numbers were good. And then: _compliance won't let us put it live_. It is a satisfying explanation because it puts the problem outside the room. Somebody else is cautious. Somebody else is slow. Somebody else doesn't understand the technology. All that's needed is a better conversation, a policy update, an executive sponsor who can push it through. That reading is almost always wrong, and it is expensive, because it sends teams to argue with the wrong department for another two quarters. Compliance saying no is rarely a verdict on your AI. It is a verdict on the process you were planning to put it inside. 01 · The complaint ## How the conversation actually goes The pattern repeats across fund administrators, asset managers and banks with unnerving consistency. A team builds something genuinely useful - document extraction on subscription packs, a first-pass check on KYC evidence, a drafting step in NAV commentary, a triage layer over an exceptions inbox. It works in test. It saves real hours. Then it enters review, and the questions start. Who approved this? Not in principle - on case 4,182, last Tuesday. Which named person, holding which role, at what time, on which version of the inputs. What evidence exists? Show the record without rebuilding it. Inputs, system responses, the model's output, the human decision, timestamped and immutable. What if it's wrong? Where does the exception go, who owns it, how quickly is it caught, and can you prove the control worked on the day it mattered? Nobody has clean answers. The review drags. The pilot goes into a holding pattern that everyone quietly understands is permanent. And the story that gets told upstairs is that compliance blocked it. 02 · The reframe ## Those questions were always owed - AI just made them unavoidable Read the three questions again. Not one of them is about artificial intelligence. Who approved it, what evidence exists, what happens when it's wrong: these are the questions any regulated process has to answer about itself, whether the work is done by a model, a macro or a graduate analyst on a Friday afternoon. If a process cannot answer them today, adding AI does not create a new governance problem. It removes the cover from an old one. A human doing the same step badly is invisible in an email thread. A model doing it is a documented system decision that somebody will eventually be asked to defend, in an audit, a client review, or a supervisory conversation with the CSSF or BaFin. Compliance is not the team blocking progress. It is the team asking the right question of a process that isn't ready for the answer it's being given. This matters because it changes who has to act. If compliance is the obstacle, the plan is persuasion: workshops, risk memos, a pilot extension, an escalation. If the process is the obstacle, the plan is engineering, and it is tractable in weeks. There is a second-order effect worth naming. Teams who believe compliance is the blocker start routing around it - shadow tooling, a spreadsheet beside the platform, "we'll formalise it later." That is how a governance gap becomes a governance incident. 03 · Two processes ## The same AI, the same compliance team, two outcomes Take one use case - AI pre-checking investor onboarding documents before a human signs off - and put it into two operations. Same model, same reviewers, same regulatory perimeter. Process A · governed from the start Approval points are defined in the workflow. Maker-checker separation is enforced by the system, not by convention. Every action - human or machine - is written to a timestamped, immutable record as it happens. Compliance asks its three questions. The team exports a completed case in the meeting: inputs, model output, confidence, the reviewer who approved, the exception that was raised and cleared. Result: review focuses on where the AI should and shouldn't act. Scope narrows, conditions get attached, and it goes live. Process B · governance assembled by hand The process lives across a core system, a shared inbox, a drive and two spreadsheets. Approvals happen in email. Evidence is whatever people remembered to save. Compliance asks the same three questions. Answering them means a reconstruction project, per case, done manually - and it still can't be repeated on demand next quarter. Result: compliance asks for structure that was never built. The AI proposal stalls, and so does the next one. The difference in outcome has nothing to do with the model, the vendor or the appetite of the compliance function. It is entirely a property of the process the AI was dropped into. 04 · What has to change ## Build the process so review is short The goal is not a faster compliance team. It is a process where compliance review is a short conversation because the evidence is already sitting there. Four things do most of that work. 1 Define the human approval points before the AI, not after Decide up front which steps a person must own: anything that moves money, admits an investor, signs a NAV, or accepts a risk. The AI works everywhere else. That boundary is the single most useful artefact you can bring to a review. 2 Make maker-checker structural Four-eyes approval enforced by the platform - separate roles, self-approval blocked, delegation and out-of-hours handled - not a policy people are trusted to follow. A control that depends on discipline is a control you cannot evidence. 3 Log automatically, at the moment of the action Every system call, model output, prompt, human decision and exception written to a timestamped audit trail as it happens. Evidence produced after the fact is a reconstruction, and reviewers treat it that way - correctly. 4 Treat exceptions as evidence, not as failure Route breaks to a named owner inside the same process, with the record attached. A process that shows compliance how it behaves when something goes wrong is far more convincing than one that only demonstrates the happy path. Do those four and the review question changes shape. It stops being "prove this is safe" and becomes "here is the trail, tell us where you want the boundary." That is a conversation that ends in production. The honest test Before you blame compliance, pick one completed case from last month and reconstruct it end to end in ten minutes. If you can't, compliance was never your problem. 05 · Proof at scale ## What it looks like when governance came first None of this is easy, and it is not automatic. It is a design decision taken early, and it holds up under volume. Proof point · Ocorian and Trade Republic 300+ fund specialists More than 300 fund specialists at Ocorian run global fund and investor operations on Next Matter, with approvals and a complete audit trail applied by default rather than added per workflow. Trade Republic runs bank-grade client operations at consumer scale on the same pattern. In both, automation and AI sit inside a process that could already answer compliance's three questions - which is why adding them was a scoping exercise, not a fight. [Read the Ocorian case study](/case-studies/ocorian) The lesson is not that these firms bypassed compliance or spent less time in review. It is that governance was a property of the process before AI arrived, so review had something real to look at. If your AI programme is stuck, the fastest route to production is not another meeting with the second line. It is spending six weeks making one process genuinely defensible - approval points defined, controls enforced by the system, evidence produced automatically - and then bringing the same AI use case back. Fix the process, not the compliance team. They were right. For the short version, see our answer page on [what makes AI adoption defensible to compliance](/answers/ai-adoption-blocked-by-compliance). For the mechanics, see [governance and audit](/governance-and-audit) and our guide to [building an audit-ready fund operations process](/guides/audit-ready-fund-operations). On this piece [01   The complaint](#s1)[02   The reframe](#s2)[03   Two processes](#s3)[04   What has to change](#s4)[05   Proof at scale](#s5) Share [share ](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnextmatter.com%2Fopinions%2Fcompliance-excuse) [alternate\_email ](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnextmatter.com%2Fopinions%2Fcompliance-excuse&text=The%20compliance%20excuse%3A%20what's%20actually%20blocking%20AI%20in%20fund%20operations) [mail ](mailto:?subject=The%20compliance%20excuse%3A%20what's%20actually%20blocking%20AI%20in%20fund%20operations&body=https%3A%2F%2Fnextmatter.com%2Fopinions%2Fcompliance-excuse) Keep reading ## Bring us the process compliance keeps sending back A working session on one real workflow, with the approval points and audit trail mapped. [Book a demo](/book-a-demo) [More opinions](/opinions) [ Answer AI adoption blocked by compliance The short version: what makes AI adoption defensible to compliance and audit. ](/answers/ai-adoption-blocked-by-compliance)[ Guide Building an audit-ready fund operations process What audit-ready means in practice, and how to build governance in rather than layer it on. ](/guides/audit-ready-fund-operations)[ Platform Governance and audit Maker-checker approvals, role separation and a timestamped audit trail applied by default. ](/governance-and-audit)[ Opinion Why can't I just use AI myself? 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