Trustworthy Real-Time Orchestration For Regulatory Compliance In Financial Transaction Systems

Abstract

Financial institutions face mounting pressure to process transactions at digital speed while satisfying increasingly complex regulatory obligations for anti-money laundering, sanctions screening, and market abuse prevention. Despite substantial advances in detection technology—particularly machine learning models and sophisticated rules engines—many organizations struggle with a less visible but equally critical challenge: orchestrating how alerts, investigations, and regulatory filings flow through their operations. Current compliance systems often handle detection well but manage workflows through ad-hoc processes that supervisors cannot easily verify or reconstruct. This article proposes a framework for designing trustworthy orchestration systems that balance real-time performance with regulatory auditability. The article centers on a four-tier architecture separating event ingestion, risk detection, workflow orchestration, and governance oversight. Within the orchestration layer, policy-driven routing mechanisms interpret compliance requirements as executable configurations rather than buried code, enabling both operational flexibility and regulatory transparency. Three core principles underpin trustworthiness: deterministic replay allowing temporal reconstruction of decisions, explainable routing linking every workflow transition to specific policy text, and shared visibility providing unified lineage tracking across organizational boundaries. Implementation presents genuine challenges around technical complexity, organizational resistance to structured workflows, and maintenance burdens as regulations evolve. Yet as detection technologies commoditize and regulatory scrutiny intensifies, the orchestration layer increasingly determines which institutions can demonstrate control over their compliance operations rather than merely asserting it.