A New Norm at SIFMA C&L Annual Seminar

If every SIFMA C&L Annual Seminar reflects the year behind us, what did the 2026 event in Orlando reveal?

At SIFMA C&L Annual Conference in 2025, a new, more business-friendly administration had only just been ushered in. There was a palpable sense of big change afoot, but not enough beyond breadcrumbs from the speakers and attendees to more fully describe the shape of that change.  

A year on, innovation, tokenization and an enforcement posture more focused on bad actors than sweeps dominate discourse. The questions hanging over the assembled lawyers and compliance professionals have shifted:

• To what degree do existing rules provide controls for the administration’s changes?  
• Which rules would be revisited?  
• AI, AI, AI . . . but for real this time?  
• And, of course, will we still be talking about off-channel comms?  

Regulatory Vibe Referendum

SEC chair Paul Atkins set the tone in the first hour. He positioned a regulatory outlook that saw opportunities for modernization wherever his gaze landed – the rulebook, technology, and AI, balancing and doing away with grey areas between SEC and CFTC. It was an extension of a vision laid out in previous proclamations of the chairman. Firms must: advance, clarify, and transform (. . . ACT, guys!). Long on vibes and short on guidance, ACT is the posture of an SEC that rewards innovation and partnership, working in parallel and not in conflict with firms.  

A down payment on that position was his extended comments on the previous chair’s off-channel comm sweep.  

“Not the SEC’s finest hour,” he said, and the ballroom burst into accordant applause.  

And while Atkins suggested record keeping rules merited updating, not even the outlines of recommendations followed.  

Those sketches fell to FINRA CEO, Robert Cook. He too had words for the off-channel comm settlements, across which he said there was insufficient evidence of wrongdoing to justify the breadth of the sweep and the deep sting of the fines. But that did not absolve firms of oversight across business communications. In instances where violations were present or exams evidenced “critical breakdowns in oversight,” regulators would continue to make cases.  

Lack of Rule Enforcement is Not the Same as No Rules 

But would the rulebook be simplified? Despite insinuations by regulators and attendant suggestions by SIFMA speakers, the view from a panel of CCOs from J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, Robinhood, and D.A. Davidson was more BAU. The rules are largely unchanged. The record-keeping sweep and massive fines had already set in place frameworks and controls for record-related governance. Most consequentially, the statute of limitations for record-keeping violations exceeds the term of any president, a point all the CCOs made and JPM J.P. Morgan’s Christine Dugger rendered in especially memorable terms.  

Sure, FCPA cases have been paused, she said, but that didn’t make bribery permissible, or its enforcement unlikely under a new administration. To emphasize the point, she described a “map of presidents” she presented to J.P. Morgan Executives. It detailed when significant regulatory violations occurred, when charges were brought and when they were ultimately settled, a time length that she measured in two to three presidents, more than enough time for the pendulum to continue its swing.  

The panel also served as a fitting snapshot for where adoption in AI stands. Unsurprisingly, J.P. Morgan had made massive strides. The coverage of voice expanded to 60 languages. False positives in desperate retreat. Soon lexicon would be vanquished, fully replaced with models.  

On the other end, J. Curtis McCubbin, CCO at D.A. Davidson, a Montana based regional, described the importance of first developing AI governance frameworks, educating and hiring personnel to guide them on their AI journey.  

These two positions – bringing life to today’s AI’s possibilities and first articulating rules of play – at first seem petabytes apart but in fact articulate a useful view of the possible and the present. Where previous events gestured broadly at AI’s potential while pointing to compliance cautions, SIFMA 2026 evidenced a landscape where adoption is picking up and frameworks are well in place.  

Your Phone or Your Life 

To foreground the breadth of AI’s potential in the mind’s attendees, the conference brought in Zack Kass, formerly head of GTM at OpenAI and a self-proclaimed AI Futurist. A free-handed stage stalker, in the Ted-talk mold, Kass brought sweeping vision and easy humor to an audience accustomed to finding meaning in the prosaic. His was an hour-long fever dream of a near future where all the jobs we think AI will replace were in fact gone… Except everyone was doing all right.  

The key, he extolled, was embracing closeness and community, crucial keys to happiness that over work and the distraction of devices had robbed us of. Wondering where your free time went? Kass asked, take a look at how much time you spend on your phone.  

And if caricaturing the off-channel comms sweep as folly had generated the first instance of spontaneous applause, his exhortation to get kids off their phones (on-channel comms?), generated an even bigger outburst. More lofty and loose than the usual SIFMA presentation, Kass’ speech served as stirring framing members used to consider AI, which inevitably wormed its way into every panel. 

Everywhere AI  

 “AI in Financial Services: Innovation, Opportunity & Risk”, was so popular the panel was repeated, both times the room brimming. The use cases covered were well trod: FCR and AML screening, lexicon replacement. What was different was how far along firms were in considering and even implementing these tools.  

“In the next two years 90% of comms review will be done by AI,” a panelist said, and no one flinched.  

The panel ended with each speaker describing how AI had become part of their own lives. Two planned their vacations with GPTs. Another was acting as interior decorator, generating renderings for the house she was renovating.  

And if those examples felt too removed from the work of compliance, a panel on third party risk brought the focus back to a topic everyone understood: contracts. For firms making a change to AI, the familiar tools of legal clauses were where the promise of those capabilities could be codified.  

In particular, they noted, contracts are where a vendor’s bluff can be called when it comes to validating what AI was real and what only lived in slides and marketing missives. It was a reminder that while the pull of new technology seems to be tugging at everyone, how that technology is onboarded and reviewed must be managed through clear uses cases, expectations and outcomes.  

This is the Year We Really See Change 

Alongside AI, a new animal darted the length of the conference: prediction markets. Several panels attempted to tackle the topic:

• The trades are essentially futures contracts 
• Individuals have the ability to know the outcome of every order, making each trade a kind of insider trade 

But how do you appropriately consider and provide coverage of prediction markets? No one was completely sure. At a panel on surveillance, they returned to more familiar ground.  

“This is the year we really see change,” KPMG’s Mike Sullivan said, discussing AI adoption.  

On that everyone seemed to agree.  

*** 

Outside the conference rooms, the Central Florida sun was either blazing or setting to gold. The green of the golf courses surrounding the hotel beamed. Packed crowds took an invitation Bill Cook had made from the stage to be curious and engaged by interacting with each other at length. 

All the while, a song had ear warmed its way into the back of my head. One panelist’s personal use of AI involved creating birthday songs for friends in the genre of the friend’s choosing. With SIFMA deputy counsel, Melissa MacGregor’s jubilee not far away, he had played an AI generated, old timey country song that extolled her legal chops and personal qualities. Old and new comingling, washing over the assembled attendees.  

The rules may not have changed—but expectations have. If you’re figuring out what that means for your compliance strategy, get in touch.