Compliance teams in financial services companies are currently battling a perfect storm of new and complex challenges; a rise in global regulatory action combined with new sanctions on entities and individuals following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to an exponential increase in workload for employees.

Alongside this, employees are also shouldering the burden of staff shortages as financial services firms battle for specialised talent with big tech companies in the era of the Great Resignation, all while firms look to tighten their belts to cope with rising inflation and costs.

As a result, compliance teams are experiencing burnout, overwhelm and exhaustion, pushing them to seek out other opportunities and compounding the problem for managers.

To combat these challenges and free up staff time for value-add tasks, some FS firms are exploring the potential of AI-driven digital workers. This highly specialised digital workforce is being used to replicate many of the more manual and process-based tasks performed by sanctions teams, with avatars functioning as hyper-efficient members of the team. FS firms are also using these digital workers to scale flexibly at peak times and reduce capacity or virtual headcount in a responsible way if demand falls.

During this podcast, FStech was joined by Daniel Hazel, Global Head of CLM at WorkFusion to talk us through the role that digital workers can play in lightening the load on an overstretched sanctions workforce.