Compliance is a major worry for directors, data shows.

Compliance is a major worry for professionals in the corporate governance space, new data compiled by the Corporate Governance Institute has shown. 

Measured based on the urgency with which boards are tackling the issue, the vast majority of directors are focusing on improving compliance in the short term. For most, it’s not an issue to be kicked down the road, nor is it something that can be addressed after other major challenges that boards seem to face en masse in this chaotic business decade. 

Moreover, while the level of attention is high, the numerous challenges boards have in addressing compliance paint a worrying picture, as all are significant, and all require considerable investment to solve. 

The full results are contained in the new white paper: Boardroom Resilience in 2026: Independent Research into Board Readiness, Risk and Strategy.

80% of directors say that improving their company’s regulatory compliance is a boardroom priority within the next year. Of those:

• 33% viewed it as incredibly urgent, wanting to focus on it within 6 months.
• And 47% viewed it as a priority within 7-12 months. 

Of the respondents outside this band, just under 26% viewed it as a long-term priority to be addressed in over 12 months. Meanwhile, over 5% didn’t view it as a priority at all. While there may be subjective reasoning behind the logic in that cohort, 5% is still an alarming figure for a boardroom challenge that grows in importance every year. 

Nevertheless, the underlying truth remains: most boards recognise the urgency around compliance. The current levels of preparation might vary among different companies, but most boards have fully accepted the need for action.

The above figures paint a more severe picture when we look at what respondents considered the most common challenges to improving compliance. The top three were:

• The complex and evolving regulatory environment (36%)
• Lack of high-quality governance data and insights (34%)
• Insufficient training or upskilling for directors (32.2%)

By any measure, each one of these challenges requires immediate attention. The regulatory environment has shifted dramatically over the last few decades – not only in the UK and Ireland where this survey was conducted, but further afield also: across the EU, in the GCC, the Far East, and North America. Every one of these regions has seen new regulations following the Great Recession that put more pressure on directors. 

Think of milestones like GDPR or CSRD. Both have placed considerably more work on the shoulders of directors, and while they’ve come from European lawmakers, their reach extends far beyond European borders, through supply chain clauses. 

As directors work to manage this pressure, the lack of sufficient data or the inability to process it becomes an obvious weakness. Full compliance with financial, risk or sustainability reporting, for example, requires swathes of data. Ten or fifteen years ago, it might have sufficed for directors to simply show they had it. Nowadays, they need to use it to tell accurate stories of how the company meets its own strategic goals and regulatory standards. AI and other innovations are finally giving new hope in this area, but many companies still lack the organisational skills to process everything available to them. 

And that brings us to training – the third main challenge. It’s good that almost one in three directors recognise the value of training to the modern boardroom. However, given the level of responsibilities, that recognition should be stronger. 

Dedicated governance training is what gives directors the foundations to understand the modern responsibilities placed on boards and the know-how to oversee decision-making in these areas. Years ago, training wasn’t a priority for directors because there was a much stronger passive culture. Boards would simply rubber-stamp C-suite decisions a lot of the time. Nowadays, that’s a huge red flag. Directors are expected to challenge anything that doesn’t make sense, and they won’t have that context without training.

It’s crucial to flag the unwavering truth about modern compliance: it is not going away. The 2020s have seen more politically disruptive parties gain power across the globe, and some of them have blasted increased compliance as unnecessary red tape. 

While that might make it seem like the future is more “watered-down”, these increased regulations have been decades in the making, and undoing every update rulebook simply isn’t possible. The responsibilities, the scrutiny, and the standards will continue.