"Since I joined three and a half years ago, our compliance spend has tripled. Our profits haven’t".

That insight, shared at our recent Beyond Compliance breakfast, captures the pressure many legal and corporate service firms across the GCC now face.

On the 29th October at Orchestrating Identity’s Beyond Compliance Breakfast, we were joined by 25+ legal practitioners, who gathered to discuss the problems, solutions and technologies that are currently facing the compliance industry.

1. Compliance as friction and cost

Legal service providers see client onboarding as an operational drag.

Many of the pains discussed included:

• Time and cost: Onboarding can take weeks or months, delaying billing and choking cash flow. McKinsey reports that corporate onboarding can take up to 100 days in some markets.

• Repetition: Clients repeatedly supply KYC documents to different departments or counterparties with little visibility of progress.

• Cultural resistance: Especially in the Gulf, clients view KYC as intrusive (“Why do you need my source of wealth?”), while regulators are required to ask for more proof.

• Unclear accountability: Legal, procurement, and finance all review the same documents in silos no single source of truth.

One consultancy firm summarised how it felt to be onboarded by a law firm: “We receive endless Excel sheets, get sent to multiple portals, repeat the same information, and then it disappears into a black hole. It costs us hundreds of thousands a month in consultant time.”

This underscores a clear pain statement: compliance today feels manual and duplicative, and is seen by the business as an expense.

2. Compliance as a potential opportunity for trust

“Compliance can be a business asset if it demonstrates trust, not bureaucracy,” said Katie Hiess, the moderator, as she summarised the opinions in the room.

Onboarding is the first touchpoint in a client relationship. Handled well, it can be a foundation of trust; handled poorly, it signals inefficiency and erodes confidence.

As an example, one in-house legal counsel described their hesitations with current onboarding processes: “We cannot send org charts or UBO documents to a generic email. We need to know who is looking at it, how it’s stored, and that it’s used only for that purpose.”

Legal firms want to transform onboarding from a regulatory obligation to a relationship-building moment, one that signals transparency, professionalism, and respect for data sensitivity.

3. Navigating evolving regulatory expectations

Across the GCC, regulatory expectations are evolving rapidly reflecting the region’s growing commitment to global standards and FATF alignment. For firms, this creates a dynamic environment where compliance excellence is increasingly seen as a competitive advantage.

As one head of department noted, “The standards have risen significantly in just a few years and so have the expectations around documentation, traceability, and data governance.”

Evolving oversight: Regulators in DIFC, ADGM, and other UAE jurisdictions are intensifying audits and enhancing requirements to ensure continued confidence from international partners.

Shifting guidance: Firms discussed how interpretation of key terms such as “certified” and “verified” can vary, underscoring the importance of close collaboration and dialogue between industry and regulators.

Proportional implementation: Smaller firms and boutique CSPs are adapting to frameworks originally designed for larger institutions, which makes proportionate technology adoption and scalable solutions especially valuable.

The consensus was clear: technology should not only digitise compliance but also strengthen alignment with regulatory intent enabling firms to demonstrate readiness, transparency, and consistent governance.

By adopting tools that make processes auditable, traceable, and interoperable, firms can move from reactive compliance to proactive assurance helping regulators see a clearer picture of compliance performance across the ecosystem.

4. Technology requirements

Law firms, compliance companies and CSPs are seeking tech-enabled orchestration, not just automation:

• Single client records shared across teams and counterparties (“one source of truth”).

• End-to-end transparency for partners and clients so everyone knows where an onboarding sits.

• Audit-ready reporting at the click of a button for inspections.

• Features to manage sensitive data securely.

• Interoperability across systems and regulators, avoiding “portal fatigue.”

• Evolving compliance logic: workflows that update automatically as regulation changes.

This shifts the requirement from “one-off digital KYC” to compliance orchestration a coordinated, transparent ecosystem that satisfies all stakeholders: clients, regulators, and internal teams.

5. The two-year horizon

Participants expect slow regulatory reform but fast tech evolution:

• Digital ID momentum: national and platform-based identity systems (e.g. UAE Pass) will accelerate.

• Persistent fragmentation: multiple jurisdictions, languages, and free zones will keep workflows complex.

• Regulator engagement crucial: tech adoption will only scale if solutions are co-designed with regulatory buy-in.

Technology’s opportunity is to bridge that gap providing the connective tissue between firms’ internal processes, client experience, and regulator assurance.

What next?

The conversations from our Beyond Compliance breakfast made one thing clear: the firms pulling ahead aren’t simply digitising compliance, they’re orchestrating their internal and external compliance journeys, and all the relevant components.

To continue that dialogue, we’re developing a Whitepaper. If you enjoyed our event, or even missed out, stay tuned as we release the next in the series of insights on Compliance and Onboarding experiences.

Orchestrating Identity

At Orchestrating Identity, we’re helping legal and professional service firms move Beyond Compliance, from slow, fragmented onboarding to orchestrated trust. Our platform connects the people, policies, and data needed to deliver transparency, efficiency, and confidence for clients and regulators.