“Compliance doesn’t have to be a bottleneck; it can be a competitive advantage,” said Aydin Bonabi, CEO and co-founder of Surveill, highlighting the transforming role of technology in financial services.

Speaking at the Finance Magnates London Summit 2025, he emphasized that modern brokers face growing regulatory scrutiny while trying to scale their businesses, and that AI tools are increasingly key to balancing speed and oversight.

In an interview with Jonathan Fine, Content Strategist at Ultimate Group, Bonabi expanded on these themes. A recurring topic across panels and side discussions was “negative friction” in financial services—where compliance, traditionally seen as a cost center, can either hinder or accelerate growth depending on how it is managed.

Bonabi argued that artificial intelligence is reshaping how brokers manage risk without slowing operations, turning compliance into a potential differentiator.

Surveill AI Raises $1 Million for Compliance Tools

Surveill AI is a US-based compliance technology company that provides AI-driven tools for monitoring communications, marketing, and regulatory content in financial firms. Its platform uses rule-based artificial intelligence to identify potential compliance risks, ensure adherence to regulatory standards such as FINRA and the SEC, and maintain traceable audit records.

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The system is designed to support human compliance officers while reducing the time and cost of oversight. The company raised approximately $1 million in seed funding in 2025 to develop its technology and expand its market presence.

Monitoring Influencer Marketing

Bonabi, speaking on the monitoring side of the compliance equation, focused on one of the industry’s most persistent pain points: oversight of introducing brokers and influencer-driven marketing. Regulators, particularly in the UK, are paying close attention to what is being communicated to retail clients, even when those messages originate far from a firm’s own marketing department.

“Firms have the obligation to monitor these IBs,” Bonabi said, noting that the distance between affiliates and the broker creates “a tremendous amount of risk.” Surveill’s systems, he explained, scan published marketing outputs across more than 190 languages to identify statements that could mislead consumers or breach regulatory guidelines.

Early Flagging Prevents Issues

The risk is not hypothetical. Bonabi pointed to cases where AI-driven monitoring identified problematic claims made by affiliates that could have resulted in regulatory action or reputational damage. By flagging such issues early, he said, brokers were able to intervene before enforcement costs mounted.

Compliance Meets Marketing

A notable point of agreement during the discussion was that compliance and marketing are no longer operating in isolation. While compliance teams remain the ultimate gatekeepers, Bonabi said Surveill increasingly works directly with marketing departments—an approach that reflects changing internal dynamics at brokers.

Reducing Approval Bottlenecks

“Marketing teams want to get content out as fast as possible,” he said. “Compliance represents a bottleneck.” His argument was that AI can ease this tension by reducing approval times from days to minutes, without lowering regulatory standards. In this model, technology does not replace compliance officers but augments them.

AI as Virtual Compliance Officer

Bonabi described Surveill’s AI as “a compliance officer that is trained to operate like an in-house compliance officer,” built around regulatory rules rather than probabilistic guesswork. Each flagged issue is linked to a specific rule, accompanied by an explanation and a citation—an effort to address regulators’ and firms’ demands for traceability and transparency.

Managing AI Reliability

The question of AI reliability inevitably followed. Large language models have drawn scrutiny for so-called hallucinations—confident but incorrect outputs that can be dangerous in a regulated environment.

Bonabi was candid about early challenges, saying initial hallucination rates were around 30 percent, though he claimed they have since been reduced to zero through what he described as an “agentic framework” involving multiple AI checks on each piece of content.

Human-Led AI Oversight

“We believe in the concept of human-led AI,” he said, stressing that a human compliance officer still signs off on every decision. The anecdote underscored a broader point echoed across the summit: AI adoption in financial services is less about autonomy and more about controlled scalability.

Changing Compliance Mindset

Looking beyond technology, Bonabi reflected on how attitudes toward compliance have shifted over the past decade. Drawing on his experience as an industry veteran and former FXCM executive, he said firms have long viewed compliance as a “necessary cost center.” That mindset, he argued, is increasingly at odds with the need to scale in a tightly regulated market.

Technology Reduces Operational Friction

“If compliance cannot scale, then there’s friction,” he said. The opportunity, in his view, is to “unlock compliance and make compliance a competitive advantage for the firm.”

That framing resonated with the summit’s broader narrative. As regulatory scrutiny intensifies and marketing channels become more diffuse—spanning influencers, affiliates, and global audiences—manual processes are struggling to keep up. Technology, when carefully governed, is emerging as a way to reduce friction rather than add to it.

Compliance Shapes Growth Trajectory

Bonabi hinted that new client segments, including proprietary and funded account firms, may soon come into focus, suggesting that the same pressures are spreading beyond traditional retail brokerage models.

For an industry facing growth constraints and increased oversight, the discussion in London focused on compliance beyond enforcement. How firms manage compliance may affect both the pace and sustainability of their growth.