The SIFMA Compliance & Legal Annual Seminar is, year after year, the preeminent gathering for compliance and legal professionals across financial services and this year’s conference did not disappoint. Held in Orlando, the event brought together expert industry and regulatory speakers for deep-dive discussions on the industry’s key topics. For the Theta Lake team, it was an energizing few days. We came as a sponsor with a booth in the exhibit hall, and the conversations we had reinforced just how urgently the industry needs modern, purpose-built solutions for the compliance challenges ahead.
It would be hard to overstate how central artificial intelligence was to this year’s agenda. Whether I was in a breakout or in the general sessions, AI governance kept surfacing; and not in the abstract way it did a few years ago. Firms are actively deploying AI tools across a variety of use cases.
A few sessions explored what firms are doing to harness the promise of generative AI while ensuring that governance programs account for regulatory, data privacy, information security, and IP risks. That framing resonated strongly with what we hear from our customers every day.
The regulatory angle was equally prominent. Speakers across multiple sessions touched on how existing rules related to everything from BCP to recordkeeping are being stress-tested by widespread AI adoption.
At our booth, the topic that drew the most animated conversations was AI governance for prompts and responses. Specifically, we discussed how firms should think about capturing, archiving, and supervising AI-assisted communications happening inside platforms like Microsoft Copilot, Zoom AI Companion, Anthropic, and ChatGPT. These tools are being adopted at scale inside firms, and compliance teams are rightfully asking: what risks exist in these “AIComms” and how can we best manage them in a manner that aligns with our risk appetites and potential regulatory requirements?
We walked through how Theta Lake approaches that challenge with governance and inspection capabilities designed specifically for AI-generated content, not bolted on as an afterthought to legacy infrastructure. We also had a lot of productive conversations about what it means to have truly modern, cloud-native compliance technology. So much of the incumbent archiving market is built on old architecture that was never designed for today’s unified communications environment, let alone for AI.
The first-day keynote panel featuring SEC Chairman Paul Atkins was a marquee moment of the conference. Atkins laid out the organizing framework for everything the SEC is doing right now under the acronym ACT: Advance, Clarify, and Transform. Every initiative the SEC is working on–every rule proposed, every interpretive release, and every institutional reform –falls into one of three categories.
This framing was enormously clarifying for the room. Rather than parsing individual rulemakings in isolation, Atkins offered a coherent lens through which to understand the SEC’s priorities as a whole. On the Transform pillar, Chairman Atkins likened the current regulatory framework to an overstuffed attic, basement, and garage in need of a thorough “spring cleaning.” That metaphor landed and you could feel the audience appreciating the candor. Books and records requirements were specifically cited as among the areas ripe for that kind of review and modernization.
Another highlight was a fireside conversation between Morgan Stanley’s Eric Grossman and SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce. Grossman made a point that I’ve heard compliance professionals echo for years: the rules have not kept pace with the way people actually communicate. His framing was pragmatic. firms should be focused on capturing the “essence of the transaction,” not on the specific medium through which it is sent. He also noted something that strikes me as genuinely important: conversations that once happened orally are now happening in writing, thanks to platforms like Teams, Slack, and Zoom. That shift has enormous implications for what firms are capturing and what regulators expect them to capture.
Commissioner Peirce added an important nuance on the recordkeeping front, noting that the SEC’s approach to recordkeeping for investment advisers is meaningfully different from its approach for broker-dealers, and that the Commission is actively working through what those distinctions should look like in the current environment. That’s a live and consequential question given SIFMA’s pending recordkeeping rule change proposal.
Walking away from Orlando, what struck me was the convergence happening between regulatory rethinking and technological transformation. The SEC is in the midst of a genuine effort to modernize its rulebook. At the same time, AI is forcing compliance teams to confront questions about governance that their existing infrastructure simply wasn’t built to answer.
That space is Theta Lake’s sweet spot. It was gratifying to have those conversations at the booth, in session hallways, and over coffee and to come away with a clear sense that the market is moving in the direction we’ve been building toward. We’re looking forward to continuing those conversations as the regulatory landscape continues to evolve.
