Every compliance leader faces the same conversation at budget planning time: justify the spend, prove the ROI, show what the firm is getting for its investment.
It's a fair question. The answer just isn't always comfortable.
You can explain the regulatory requirements and talk about risk mitigation. What's harder to justify is the £232,457 your firm burns annually on false positive investigations.
That's not your compliance budget. That's pure waste - money spent investigating obvious non-issues instead of catching real problems, clearing noise instead of managing risk.
Here's where that money goes, and what you could be doing with it instead.
$232,457 isn't a worst-case scenario. It's the average annual cost of false positive inefficiencies across firms, based on our Mobile Communications Benchmark Report surveying 200 senior US compliance decision-makers.
Compliance teams spend an average of 308 hours annually managing mobile communications surveillance - and 78% of those teams report frequent false positives. That means most of those hours are spent reviewing messages that never should have been flagged in the first place. Your team's time vanishes, and when it's spent clearing noise instead of managing risk, costs add up fast.
You're paying for surveillance tools that generate alerts, then paying your team to review them. When the vast majority are false positives, this time is wasted. Then come the downstream costs: alert fatigue, lost productivity, and strategic work that never happens because your team is drowning in phantom risks.
Quieter costs compound over time. Turnover from burnout. Delayed initiatives when compliance doesn't have bandwidth. Integration costs for workarounds when your current system can't deliver what you need. Add it all together and you reach $232,457 for the average firm.
These are real investments that strengthen your business. Instead, you're spending that budget on something worse than worthless - a system that actively undermines your team's capacity to do their job.
This isn't a one-time expense. It's annual, and it's getting worse. Message volumes increase every year. Alert fatigue sets in, which means reviews take longer and accuracy drops, creating even more work. The $232,457 this year becomes $250,000 next year, then $275,000.
Your CFO is still asking the same question: "What are we getting for this spend?"
Sentinel's intelligent supervision reduces false positives by up to 90%. That's not just fewer alerts - it's reclaiming the majority of the budget you're currently spending on waste. For most firms, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars you can redirect to strategic initiatives that protect and enable your business.
As Sentinel uses explainable AI, you're not trading one black box for another. You maintain complete oversight and accountability while eliminating the waste that's been consuming your budget.
False positives aren't an acceptable cost of compliance. They're a solvable problem that's consuming resources you could be using to protect your firm and strengthen your team.
The waste is enormous, the cost is quantifiable, and there are better tools available. Worth addressing before next year's budget conversations start.
Next in this series: How surveillance anxiety affects the 84% of employees concerned about their privacy - and what that means for your compliance culture.
Ready to reclaim your compliance budget? Download our eBook: Don't Just Trust It: The Case for Explainable AI in Compliance.