VIDEO | Technology, talent, and the future of compliance - Trade Treasury Payments

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At the ITFA Americas Annual Conference in Miami, Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) spoke with David Cooperman, Head of Business Development for the Americas and Global Head of Partnerships at Complidata, to discuss how technology is reshaping compliance and sanctions processes, and where the biggest risks still lie.

Cooperman said, “If you go back fifteen or twenty years, sanctions and compliance checks were largely manual. People were highlighting names on paper, feeding those into screening engines, and working from experience and intuition. It was difficult to scale, and difficult to replicate.”

Today, the expectations are much higher. Regulators demand more scrutiny, faster decision-making, and a consistent application of rules across institutions. In that context, automation has become indispensable, but not as a replacement for people.

Cooperman said, “What technology enables is better risk decisions. Not necessarily by removing people from the process, but by allowing experienced staff to focus on complex cases and helping newer staff learn faster. The system can guide them to the right questions, what to flag, where to dig, why something matters.”

One of the most overlooked compliance risks, he argued, is human inconsistency.

“People get tired. They get sick, go on holiday, have a bad day. A computer, when built correctly, doesn’t have those fluctuations. It’s consistent. It’s repeatable. That’s why it can be such a powerful complement to a human-led process.”

From a policy perspective, sanctions and financial crime are under renewed scrutiny as geopolitical risks rise. At the conference, one issue in particular dominated the agenda.

Cooperman said, “Tariffs came up in every single conversation. If we’d had this conference last year, I doubt the word would’ve been mentioned once. That just shows how quickly the world is changing.”