FINRA’s 2026 Oversight Priorities and the Future of Supervision

FINRA’s 2026 Annual Regulatory Oversight Report arrives at a critical moment for financial services firms. Artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from experimentation to operational dependency. Communications channels continue to expand and fragment. Financial crime is becoming faster, more sophisticated, and harder to detect.

Together, these forces are reshaping supervisory expectations — and exposing gaps that traditional compliance approaches are no longer equipped to manage.

FINRA is not prescribing technologies. But it is raising the bar for governance, documentation, testing, and accountability. Firms are increasingly expected to supervise outcomes, not intentions, and demonstrate that controls scale as complexity increases.

Download this report to learn:

• Where FINRA sees the most significant supervisory risk heading into 2026
• Why familiar issues like recordkeeping and communications continue to generate findings
• How AI — including agentic AI — is changing expectations for governance and accountability
• What compliance and risk leaders can do now to strengthen defensibility and resilience