Future-Proofing Financial Services: Strategies For CIOs Navigating Global Market Complexity

Forbes

16-07-2025

Alex Ford is president of Encompass, North America.
Navigating diverse global markets is becoming more complex due to rising regulatory demands alongside ongoing instability, trade disputes and geopolitical conflict. Countries are so interdependent that changes in one can affect the entire world. For example, consider how U.S. tariffs have rerouted the world's shipments and impacted sales of countless products.
To future-proof their global operations, companies and the financial service providers who support them must act now to strategically plan and embrace technology and digitalization to best prepare themselves for the ongoing storm of change that's rewriting the global economy.
Rising Complexities
With the global market reacting quickly to ongoing changes, a multitude of factors are making it increasingly more complicated to do business across borders. Jane Fraser, CEO of Citi, recently mentioned the shift away from globalization in her article about how companies are managing ambiguity by suspending investments, slowing hiring (U.S. companies added 26% fewer jobs this year than last year) and strengthening their balance sheets to prepare for the unknown.
Differing regulations across jurisdictions complicates matters, forcing businesses to keep up with which regulations are applicable in each location and fast-tracking adjustments in their businesses practices to stay compliant. Regulations regarding employment, finances, recordkeeping, data conventions and interoperability of systems between markets are changing too quickly for old styles of monitoring to keep up.
What's At Stake
Finding your company out of compliance with regulations such as the EU's Anti-Money Laundering Directives, the UK's Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act or the U.S. Corporate Transparency Act can result in suspended trading or operations, wreaking havoc on customers, the supply chain and bottom line. Lost revenue, missed business opportunities and reputational damage can hobble a company for years. Even if business is allowed to continue, investigations due to noncompliance are distracting and funnel resources and attention away from growth activities.
Digital-First Is Key To Future Readiness
Future readiness for global change starts with a digital outlook. During the Covid-19 pandemic, scores of businesses were forced to adapt to digital experiences. Once they transitioned, they realized how convenient it was to automate and digitize actions like data and document collation. With digital processes in place, adapting to changes in the market is exponentially faster than with manual processes.
Being digital first means having accurate data with identifiable origins. Everything digital is driven by data, and as AI becomes more embedded in decision-making, good, clean data is not just helpful, it is essential. High-quality data is the foundation for future readiness and for ensuring AI delivers reliable, explainable outcomes.
Digital literacy across the workforce, especially in roles like legal, risk and compliance, is becoming essential. At BNY, CIO Leigh-Ann Russell highlighted how their legal team embraced AI by completing full training and proactively supporting innovation. This approach ensures collaboration on data safety and privacy, with informed partners rather than barriers.
Digital readiness also positions firms to be competitive when new products, ecosystems and business models emerge. For example, the rise of digital assets has picked up pace in 2025 and digital identity goes hand-in-hand with serving this market. Digital identity is a key theme across all jurisdictions. Forward-thinking leaders must be aware of and ready to engage in initiatives like these.
Preparing For Digitization
In response to the growing complexity and fragmentation of global anti-money laundering and 'Know Your Customer' regulations, some industries are banding together to create unified standards. For example, the biggest banks in the world, as well as infrastructure providers and exchanges, are among members of the Financial Markets Standards Board, a UK-based body that develops standards firms for certain operations and compliance in financial markets.
Technology As Strategy
Global businesses are harnessing a broad range of new and proven technologies to stay up to date and manage risk. Monitoring for change, then planning and responding to it, is a huge responsibility for CIOs, CROs, CTOs and their compliance teams. The right technology can help businesses both create and execute strategy by staying abreast of change and pivoting quickly when necessary.
• Automation: Automation continues to play a critical role alongside AI when it comes to executing procedures and implementing controls in a digitized manner at scale. For example, it enables financial institutions to quickly implement policy changes in response to evolving regulations and ensures consistent adherence. Unlike AI, which relies heavily on the availability and quality of input data and may lack built-in quality control, automation provides a structured, rule-based approach that ensures accuracy where there's no margin for error. It also offers banks the confidence of a clear audit trail and demonstrable data lineage, allowing them to consistently evidence data provenance and meet compliance obligations with transparency.
• Cloud-based systems: Cloud data storage and processing increases speed of scalability, may lower costs compared to managed data infrastructure and enables easier interoperability across systems.
• AI and agentic AI, including intelligent document processing: AI use-cases feel limitless and, at this point, arguably introduce as much risk and complexity as it may help address. To keep innovation relevant, keeping the problem you are trying to solve front of mind is key. One use-case with an obvious ROI and wide adoption early on in financial services is using AI to extract information from the many cumbersome structures and unstructured documents relied on throughout the client lifecycle to remove time, cost and error.
• Corporate digital identification: It's every company's responsibility to know who they do business with. Corporate digital identity technology enables leaders to understand risk exposure amid trade wars and geopolitical uncertainty.
Building In Flexibility From The Start
In a world where trends change daily, building in flexibility from the start is the best way to plan. Start with a global outlook and make predictions for five or 10 years, then back up and build a plan that focuses on the first 12-18 months. That way, your organization can make bold decisions but also be nimble when change occurs.
Plan For The Future
Economic and political uncertainty creates complexities for businesses. With careful planning, the right technology and forward thinking, companies can ensure they are in the best position to future-proof their organizations and thrive in diverse global markets. As the power of AI and data to drive efficiency, agility and smarter decision-making increases in ever faster and greater waves, the importance and potential of technology as a competitive advantage has never been clearer.
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