Jacquelyn Pruet: ​Compliance of the future—A value driver, not a cost center

Yet compliance has too often been treated only as a cost center, the place executives turn when something has already gone wrong. The future of our profession is in doing more than reacting to crises. It is in driving value by building trust, preventing problems before they escalate, and shaping standards that define the business of tomorrow.

My own path was unusual. It started in banking, where I worked in mergers and acquisitions assimilations, helping to merge banks in as little as three to four months. From there, I became the state’s chief regulator for law enforcement licensing in Texas, writing the statutes that governed the licensure of more than 100,000 officers. It was the best job I have ever had, but government work did not pay enough, and that is how I stumbled into corporate compliance.

When I arrived, I was not shocked to find that we had no budget. Banking had taught me to work with what I had. The state had taught me to stretch nothing into something. I have often heard the refrain: “I don’t have the budget. How can I achieve results?” My message is this: pivot from that mindset. We don’t need more. We need to work with what we have.

I have yet to meet a department in any corporation that is truly well-funded unless it is an AI initiative. The answer is not a bigger budget. The answer is in relationships, in partnerships, in understanding the people you are trying to reach. I have seen teams with enormous budgets and poor results, and I have seen teams with almost no budget achieve 98 percent adoption rates. The difference is not the money. It is what you do with what you have.

Compliance is often seen only as emergency care, the ambulance that arrives when something has already gone wrong. But our real value is in prevention. Just as preventative healthcare reduces long-term costs and improves outcomes, preventative compliance reduces crises, investigations, and reputational damage. Emergency cases will always be expensive, but when prevention is strong, they are fewer and rarer. That is where the real savings lie, not only in money but in trust. Over time, that shift is what begins to move compliance from being seen only as a cost center to being recognized as a true value center.

To me, our job is not only about rules, tools, and procedures. It is about relationships. We build trust with executives to shape the tone at the top. We build trust with middle managers, the iron middle, so they can drive change in real time. And we build trust with frontline employees, because without their buy-in, none of it matters. You can write the best policies, launch the smartest tools, or design the tightest procedures, but without trust, they will sit unused.

It is also about innovation. The future of compliance belongs to those who look forward, who partner with regulators and industry leaders to shape the standards of tomorrow. We see this now with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) inviting compliance voices into roundtables on AI policy. These opportunities are not only about shaping law but about demonstrating that compliance brings strategic value. These relationships are what shift compliance from merely saving money to creating real business impact.

Across banking, regulation, and corporate compliance, this has been the number one lesson of my career. Real change is built on relationships. Real compliance is about trust. And when we combine trust with prevention and innovation, we not only save money, we create value. That is the future of compliance.

So yes, we face enormous challenges. We are asked to solve the unsolvable with limited resources. We hold up the mirror to our organizations when they least want to look. And we do it anyway, because we believe in this work.

That is why I am proud to be a compliance officer.