Summary

Compliance Event 2026

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Regulators, CEOs, and legal, risk and compliance professionals gathered for the Leaders in Finance Compliance Event under the theme “The Future of Compliance in Financial Services.” The day moved from a wide-angle view of how trust in banking is being redesigned by AI, through a live debate on where compliance itself is heading, to detailed briefings on capital markets, crypto regulation and financial crime, closing with a candid, four-decade perspective on what compliance too often gets wrong. The event opened with a moment of silence for Michela Frisa, a valued member of the Leaders in Finance community and former moderator, who passed away suddenly.

This document summarizes the speeches, interviews, panels and cases at the event. It is not a verbatim transcript, but a paraphrased synopsis of the key points made. It has been prepared and published by Leaders in Finance. Please note that this summary was created with the help of AI tools. While care has been taken to ensure accuracy, the content may contain errors or omissions. For full clarity or specific details, please feel free to contact us.

Key takeaways

Compliance is shifting from a control function to a design function. Across the panel discussion and multiple speeches, the recurring message was that compliance can no longer review decisions after the fact. To keep pace with AI and new products, compliance needs a seat at the table from the very beginning, embedding controls into design rather than checking for them afterward.
AI concentration is becoming a systemic risk regulators are watching closely. With most of the financial sector relying on the same handful of foundation models and cloud providers, speakers warned that a single model update or outage could ripple through many institutions at once, echoing the correlated failures of 2008, but through shared technology rather than shared products.
Fighting AI-native fraud requires AI-native defenses, not more headcount. Attackers using AI have unlimited time and near-zero marginal cost, and fraud is estimated to be compounding at roughly 30% a year. Speakers argued that deterministic, auditable, continuously monitored AI systems, not simply hiring more analysts, are the only way for compliance to keep up.

Crypto is rapidly becoming fully regulated, mainstream financial infrastructure. With MiCA’s single EU rulebook now in force, transitional periods ending, and traditional banks reportedly pursuing their own crypto licenses, several speakers argued the sector should stop treating crypto as a speculative side topic and start treating it as core financial infrastructure, including for fighting financial crime.
The intense focus on financial crime may be crowding out other costly risks. A closing, candid perspective from a veteran non-executive director warned that conduct risk, conflicts of interest, data privacy and governance deserve just as much attention as financial crime, and that treating “people risk” as HR’s problem alone is a mistake

Opening – Leanne Joseph (moderator)

Leanne Joseph, moderator of the day, welcomed regulators, CEOs, and compliance professionals under the theme of AI, tech and crypto reshaping compliance. A show of hands confirmed that most attendees expect these forces to significantly affect their role within the next 12 months. She thanked event partners Deloitte, Sens, Rabobank and the Dutch Banking Association, and invited Jeroen Broeckman on stage to lead a moment of reflection in memory of Michela Frisa, a former moderator and valued member of the community who had recently passed away.

Keynote – Sheila Gemin

Sheila Gemin, a technology executive currently on sabbatical from ING, opened by tracing how trust in banking has been redesigned repeatedly over the decades, from the introduction of the ATM in 1968, through the rise of banking apps after the iPhone, the 2008 financial crisis, and the shift to cloud and GDPR, to today’s AI wave. She cited research showing younger generations are far more likely to bank with multiple institutions, including neobanks such as Revolut (which is expanding into phone subscriptions), and noted that a majority of business bankers are considering switching to non-bank providers due to unmet expectations around real-time service. Her central warning concerned AI concentration risk: with the financial sector’s AI stack, foundation models, cloud infrastructure, data platforms, largely built on a small handful of vendors, a single change at one provider could have unpredictable, correlated effects across many institutions at once, a risk she compared to the systemic correlation that caused the 2008 crisis, and one flagged by the Financial Stability Board. Her closing message was that compliance, technology and business together are the “architects of trust,” and that this requires model literacy, real-time tooling, and a seat at the table from the start of any AI implementation, not at the end.

Panel discussion – Compliance in a Fast-Changing Technological World

Moderated by Pieter van Doorn, Partner and Head of Financial Services Risk and Regulation, Deloitte, this panel brought together Tom van de Laar, Chief Compliance Officer, Rabobank, Jens Pöhland, Interim Chief Executive Officer, Mizuho, Bert Verdoodt, Head of Compliance for Large Corporates & Institutions, Danske Bank, and Michèle Provinciael, Head of Business Compliance, ABN AMRO. The panel debated whether more regulation is needed to enable innovation; most panelists argued the issue is less about new rules and more about interpreting existing, intentionally flexible frameworks like the EU AI Act with a risk-based mindset. They agreed compliance is shifting from a “control function” reviewing decisions to a “design function” embedding controls upfront, which requires new talent, including data scientists and technologists, alongside traditional legal expertise. On whether AI agents will replace compliance officers within a decade, the room largely disagreed, with panelists arguing AI will augment detection, monitoring and policy drafting (moving from sampling to full-population testing) but that human judgment must remain in the loop for risk appetite calls, ethical product decisions and strategic choices like M&A. They closed by agreeing that risk types are becoming deeply interconnected, requiring cross-functional expert groups (for example on digital assets) and more forward-looking, real-time risk indicators rather than static, siloed frameworks.

Speech – Zowie Langdon

Zowie Langdon, founder and CTO, Stealth, was the one speaker who argued AI agents will fundamentally change, if not fully replace, parts of the compliance function within a decade. She distinguished between narrow machine learning, probabilistic neural networks, and AI agents wrapped in an engineered “harness” that constrains their behavior, arguing that trust in AI systems must be deliberately engineered through predictability, reliability and auditability, including a hard-coded four-eyes principle. She cited research showing that narrowing the context fed to a model dramatically reduces error rates (from 55–88% down to below 33% in one legal-document study), and illustrated how an enhanced due diligence process can be automated safely by heavily constraining an agent’s decision tree, pairing it with continuous human oversight, and reserving final judgment for people. Her core message: financial institutions can automate significant parts of a bank, but only with exceptional rigor, and the responsibility for defining and stress-testing the boundaries of that automation falls squarely on compliance and risk leaders.

Presentation – Eva Mynott & Albert Siepel, AFM

Eva Mynott, Supervisor of Investigations, Market Abuse, and Albert Siepel, Senior Capital Markets Risk Analyst, both from the AFM, presented findings from their paper “AI and Capital Markets: Balancing Innovation and Integrity.” Structuring their analysis around the pre-trade, execution and post-trade phases of a transaction, they highlighted opportunities such as better price discovery from unstructured data and more reliable transaction monitoring, alongside three core conclusions: human design choices still drive AI outcomes but are increasingly hard to fully oversee, the growing homogeneity of AI models means risk can spread very quickly when models interact, and greater autonomy never reduces accountability. Specific risks flagged included retail investors relying on hallucination-prone generative AI for investment advice, self-learning trading models potentially discovering manipulative strategies or front-running large institutional orders, and opaque post-trade models that can exploit or even conceal loopholes in monitoring controls. They pointed to the spread of fake news about US tariffs as a real example of how quickly poisoned information can move markets, and warned that agentic trading, including cases where agents were manipulated into executing unauthorized transactions, is no longer theoretical but already live on some US retail platforms. Their call to action: robust model design, human oversight, supervisory approaches that adapt to model interaction risk, and closer international cooperation with regulators like the UK’s FCA and ESMA.

Speech – Duco van Lanschot

Duco van Lanschot, co-founder, Duna, an AI-native onboarding and compliance platform, argued that identity verification has entered a fundamentally new threat landscape. Referencing the classic “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon, he noted that today’s attacker is increasingly a model with unlimited time and near-zero marginal cost, driving fraud growth he estimated at around 30% annually, compounding to roughly 50 times current levels within a decade if unaddressed. He detailed fast-growing threats including AI-generated documents, deepfake onboarding videos (with $900 million in reported fraud in a single year), and synthetic companies with plausible but fake registry filings. His proposed answer is compliance systems that are evidence-based, deterministic and continuously rechecked, contrasting this with legacy processes so slow that one major European bank reportedly ran a three-year procurement process to replace a verification tool and then abandoned it. He shared results from his own platform, including submission times cut by 60% and a roughly 50% drop in customer-losing follow-up questions, and closed by arguing that compliance functions have effectively been acting as unpaid, unthanked gatekeepers for society, and now deserve both better tools and more recognition.

Speech – Mauro Halve

Mauro Halve, Chairman, Dutch Crypto Industry Association (VBNL), walked through the rapidly expanding regulatory stack now covering crypto: MiCA (the EU’s single market-structure rulebook), DORA (cybersecurity), the Transfer of Funds Regulation (a SWIFT-like standard for crypto transfers), extended anti-money laundering and sanctions obligations, new tax reporting rules (DAC8), and, for stablecoin issuers, an additional e-money license from a separate regulator. He broke down MiCA’s ten regulated crypto-asset services into custody, five trading-related activities (including crypto-to-fiat and crypto-to-crypto exchange, order execution, and operating a trading platform), fundraising “launchpads,” advice and portfolio management, and transfer services, noting that market abuse rules under MiCA apply broadly, even to social media influencers. He highlighted that the Netherlands currently ranks second in the EU for the number of MiCA authorizations, and that in Germany roughly thirty licensed entities are traditional banks, suggesting mainstream banks entering crypto directly is a matter of when, not if.

Speech – Hugo Leijtens, Cense

Hugo Leijtens, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Cense, spoke from his dual role in financial crime fighting and law enforcement collaboration through a Regional Information and Expertise Center. He described organized crime’s growing reliance on crypto to launder proceeds from human trafficking and drug networks, and shared concrete results from partnering with local law enforcement, including a €2.6 million crypto sting and the discovery of an illegal crypto mining operation, with total crypto confiscations growing from roughly €10 million in 2023 to over €40 million in 2024. His proposed methodology, “detect and decode,” escalates gradually: starting from a single signal such as a crypto-linked transaction or wallet pattern, adding further signals like adverse media or sanctions exposure, and only initiating a full investigation once enough signals accumulate, deliberately avoiding action on false positives. He closed with a direct appeal to banks to share more wallet and exchange data with the Financial Intelligence Unit, arguing this is what ultimately allows local law enforcement to convert compliance monitoring into real arrests and confiscations.

Speech – Lieke Helleman, AFM

Lieke Helleman, who leads MiCA supervision at the AFM, described building the regulator’s crypto supervision function essentially from scratch within a matter of months ahead of a short national transition period. She explained the shift from a fragmented system of national crypto registers to a single EU-wide rulebook and register once transitional periods end, and outlined the AFM’s three work streams: authorization, ongoing supervision (including crypto white papers), and financial crime and integrity, backed by growing in-house data and monitoring capability built partly ahead of shared EU tooling. As of the event, 26 crypto-asset service providers had been authorized in the Netherlands (19 licenses, 7 notifications), with DORA, AML and custody treated as especially high-risk areas warranting intensive review. She stressed close cooperation with ESMA on convergence and joint supervisory actions, with DNB on stablecoin-related prudential licensing, and with law enforcement on illegal activity, and confirmed that firms operating illegally must wind down in an orderly way, with customer migration actively supervised. Asked about “secret AFM requirements,” she acknowledged that while there are no hidden rules, the AFM’s demanding interpretation of open regulatory norms can feel that way to firms going through licensing.

Closing keynote – Petra van Hoeken

Petra van Hoeken, a non-executive director at Nordea, de Volksbank/ASN and Luminor, and formerly a Chief Risk Officer at ABN AMRO, RBS and Rabobank, closed the day with a candid, experience-driven challenge to the room. She argued that in practice, banks often operate with far more than three lines of defense once supervisory boards, auditors and multiple regulators are counted, and that unclear ownership between risk, compliance and the business is itself a major source of failure. Her sharpest point was that financial crime attention is crowding out other costly risks: conduct risk (citing an example of an €200 million debt-collection remediation at Nordea), conflicts of interest, data privacy, and governance, which she treats as a compliance-owned risk category because unclear roles and responsibilities are so often the root cause of failures. She also argued that “people risk” should sit under compliance’s oversight alongside HR, not be treated as purely an HR matter, especially regarding incentive structures and remuneration design. On the relationship between compliance and non-executive boards, she used a football analogy to stress that supervisory boards are teammates working toward the same goal, not external inspectors, and urged compliance professionals to report more selectively, engage proactively in shaping strategy, and build stronger influencing skills rather than waiting to be asked.

Wrap-Up & Closing Remarks

The event closed with an audience poll showing most attendees felt more confident navigating AI, tech and crypto in compliance than at the start of the day, alongside many acknowledging they now have more questions than before. Leanne Joseph thanked partners Deloitte, Sens, Rabobank and the Dutch Banking Association, and announced the next Leaders in Finance Compliance Event for 13 May 2027.

Lunch & Networking

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