Navigating the 2025 Financial Regulatory Landscape: Global vs. APAC Focus

In the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, regulators are accelerating digital-asset oversight and AML/CFT controls. On June 26, 2025, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council passed the Stablecoins Bill, establishing a licensing regime for fiat-referenced stablecoin issuers effective August 1, 2025. Issuers must now meet stringent reserve-asset management, redemption-process standards, and enhanced AML measures under the HKMA’s forthcoming supervision guidelines and AML/CFT consultation papers (response window closed June 30, 2025). The SFC also updated its non-face-to-face onboarding guidance to recognize more remote ID-verification services and expanded eligible overseas jurisdictions for client funding 2.

Across APAC, the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Financial Institutions (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act 2024 came into force on January 24, 2025, bolstering MAS’s investigative, reprimand, and inspection powers under core statutes (FAA, SFA, PSA, IA, TCA). Key enhancements include extending onsite inspection without notice, broadening powers to compel written statements, and clarifying CMSL-holder oversight for unregulated businesses such as crypto-derivatives.

Spending on compliance technology continues to rise sharply. A June 2025 survey of 300 senior compliance decision-makers across the US, UK, APAC, and Europe found 77% of firms increased their compliance budgets in 2024, with 68% already deploying AI in surveillance processes and 96% of those reporting measurable risk-reduction benefits. Global financial services accounted for over 40% of RegTech expenditure in 2023, driving demand for orchestration platforms that automate cross-border workflow and real-time monitoring.

Key Action Points for Multinational Firms

1. Conduct a Comprehensive Regulatory Gap Analysis Start by inventorying every global and local regulation that applies to your operations: EU’s DORA and MiFID II updates, PSD3, AI governance rules, Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Bill and FIMA amendments, MAS’s 2024 Financial Institutions Act revisions, etc. Use a standardized template to map each requirement against your existing policies, controls, and reporting workflows. Identify overlaps (e.g., incident-reporting protocols under both DORA and MAS) as well as conflicts (such as differing data-export constraints in China vs. GDPR). This systematic approach reveals blind spots and helps prioritize remediation by risk exposure and business impact.
2. Establish a Two-Tier GRC Architecture Build a “Central Policy Hub” for non-negotiable, enterprise-wide standards—your global code of conduct, risk taxonomy, escalation matrices, and incident-response playbooks. Layer on “Regional Compliance Modules” that mirror local statutes and market practices, embedding country-specific controls (e.g., Enhanced Due Diligence for HKMA’s AML regime or on-site inspection readiness for MAS). Leverage version control and audit-trail functionality to track updates and ensure subsidiaries adopt changes automatically. This modular design balances consistency with flexibility, reducing the burden on corporate compliance while respecting local autonomy.
3. Leverage Compliance Orchestration Platforms Choose a GRC platform with built-in RegTech connectors—APIs that feed in updates from regulatory databases (e.g., IOSCO, FATF, SFC circulars) and automatically map them to your policy library. Look for configurable workflows that trigger alerts when new rules land in specific jurisdictions, and dashboards that visualize compliance health across regions. Advanced solutions also offer machine-learning modules for predictive analytics—spotting emerging risk patterns before regulators act. By automating rule-mapping and monitoring, you cut manual work, accelerate responses, and free your team to focus on strategic initiatives.
4. Empower Regional Compliance Stewards Appoint dedicated stewards in each major market whose sole mandate is to interpret local regulation, engage with regional regulators, and translate new requirements into action items for the headquarters hub. Provide them with direct access to the GRC platform and curate a “Regulatory Bulletin” tailored for their market’s unique risks. Regular “steward syncs” ensure local insights inform the central policy hub, while quarterly performance metrics (e.g., time-to-implement, audit findings) gauge effectiveness. This two-way funnel keeps your global strategy grounded in local realities and accelerates issue escalation when urgent guidance is needed.
5. Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration Establish a GRC Steering Committee—including senior leaders from Legal, Risk, IT, Compliance, Finance, and Operations—to prioritize initiatives, allocate resources, and resolve conflicts between regional modules. Set up recurring “Regulatory Roundtables” where product teams, data/privacy officers, and frontline managers discuss upcoming changes (for example, AI-governance rules or new stablecoin standards). Embed compliance objectives into performance metrics across functions to reinforce accountability. A culture of shared ownership ensures compliance isn’t siloed—it becomes an integral part of strategic decision-making and day-to-day operations.

By aligning robust global standards with agile, location-specific controls, financial institutions can minimize regulatory friction, safeguard reputation, and turn compliance into a strategic enabler for growth.