13%
of a firm's operating costs now go on regulatory compliance — and firms consistently under-count it
PwC, Reducing the cost of compliance, 2025
84%
of compliance leaders saw costs rise over five years — a third call the rise significant
PwC, Reducing the cost of compliance, 2025
45%
of payments leaders say compliance cost is now growing faster than revenue
Industry survey of payments firms, 2026
49%
say expectations are changing faster than their systems can adapt to them
Industry survey of payments firms, 2026
The shift
Intervention now arrives before the investigation ends.
Supervisors have stopped waiting for a conclusion to act. Firms under review are being restricted mid-investigation — product lines paused, remediation compelled, client communications mandated. The window in which a control gap is a private problem has closed, and the firms that fare best are the ones that can show, on request, that the control ran on everything.
Sampling model
A finding in the sample is a finding in the population. The remediation scope is then unknown, and the lookback is manual.
With IntelCS
Scope is a known number, remediation is a filtered list, and a lookback is a re-run rather than a project.
Advice firms
If you hold your own authorisation, you own the evidence.
Firms that are directly authorised — rather than operating under another firm's umbrella — carry the whole assurance function themselves: file checking, ongoing service records, senior accountability documentation, complaints root cause. In a practice with a handful of advisers, that work usually sits with one person who also has clients of their own.
The exposure is rarely deliberate misconduct. It is a review that happened but was never written down well enough to prove years later.
80%
of advice revenue comes from ongoing service charges — the part hardest to evidence retrospectively
Regulatory review of ongoing advice services, 2025
83%
of ongoing suitability reviews were confirmed as delivered; the remainder had to be explained case by case
Regulatory review of ongoing advice services, 2025
7 yrs
of client files firms were asked to look back over to prove service delivery
Regulatory review of ongoing advice services, 2025
Ongoing service delivery
Ongoing advice fees became an issue when firms cannot not evidence that the service clients were paying for have actually been delivered. IntelCS allows firms to check every client file for evidence of work done within a review period. That evidence can determine whether remediation or redress is required.
Statement of Advice
Every recommendation is reviewed against your own advice standards — whether the client’s objectives and time horizon are clear, the risk profile is appropriate, the client can bear the potential loss, alternatives have been considered, and so on. Every advice file is reviewed, not just a sample.
Vulnerability & adapted service
Vulnerability indicators surfaced from the whole file set rather than only where an adviser tagged them — health, life events, capability, resilience — with a check that the service and communications were actually adapted, and that the adaptation was recorded.
Client communications
Reports, review letters, campaign copy, website and social content and third-party introducer material checked before release: claims substantiated, risk and benefit balanced, required warnings present, nothing that reads as advice where none was given.
New business
Every new client file checked before it settles into the back book: fact-find complete, objectives and horizon captured, research and product rationale evidenced, charges disclosed and consistent with what was agreed, and disclosure documents issued at the right point. Pre-completion review on all of it, rather than a percentage checked weeks later.
Accountability records
Statements of responsibility kept current and aligned to actual roles. Annual fitness assessments completed and evidenced. Conduct training recorded. Adviser competence files complete. The records regulators routinely ask for, but firms rarely have assembled in one place.
You should not have to wait for a complaint, audit or regulator request to discover what your records cannot prove. IntelCS gives senior teams a clear view across the whole population, with the evidence behind every conclusion already there.
How review works →Why this stack
Two questions your risk committee will ask first.
Nearly every firm in the sector is adopting machine learning somewhere in its control environment. The ones that stall do so on governance, not capability: where does client data go, and can the output be reproduced when challenged.
IntelCS is built so both answers are short. One boundary, ours, with no third-party AI vendor behind it — and a runtime that returns the same finding on every run, so a decision from three years ago can be re-executed rather than reconstructed.
Client data stays inside one boundary
A dedicated single-tenant instance on IntelCS infrastructure, with its own storage, runtime and keys. No AI sub-processor to add to your register, and client records are never used for training.
Security & data handling →Findings that reproduce under challenge
HaloRT makes model output deterministic. Re-run a past review and the finding, reasoning and cited extract come back identical — which is what makes a model-based control validatable at all.
How HaloRT works →Your interpretation, versioned
Requirements carry their own source citation, test, evidence standard, owner and effective date — so a finding always points at the rule as it stood on the day it was applied.
Requirement engine →Sources
Compliance cost as a share of operating costs, and five-year cost trend — PwC, Reducing the cost of compliance, November 2025
Compliance cost growth versus revenue, and systems adaptation — survey of senior leaders at payments firms, 2026
Ongoing service revenue share, suitability review delivery rates and lookback period — multi-firm review of ongoing advice services, February 2025
Machine learning adoption in financial crime screening — Oxford Economics & LexisNexis Risk Solutions, True Cost of Compliance
Supervisory intervention during live investigations, and off-channel communications findings — enforcement trend analysis, January 2026