From fragmented to frictionless

Executive summary

For fast-growing companies ($50M+), scaling isn’t just about entering new markets; it’s about managing complexity without slowing the business down. Lean legal, tax, risk, and trade teams are expected to support rapid expansion into new jurisdictions, keep pace with constant regulatory change, and stay audit-ready, all while enabling the speed the business demands.

This revenue range represents a critical inflection point. Organizations are large enough to face enterprise-scale compliance complexity across multiple jurisdictions, yet typically lack the resources and infrastructure of billion-dollar companies. At this stage, teams are managing enterprise-level expectations with mid-market resources, often with just two to five professionals per compliance function.

At the same time, the rules keep shifting. Trade regulations are in flux. Legal and tax requirements evolve across borders. New risk vectors emerge overnight. Additionally, AI is reshaping how work gets done. In this environment, compliance can no longer operate as a back-office function. It has become a critical growth enabler. For executive teams, the risk isn’t just non-compliance, it’s losing speed, visibility, and confidence at exactly the moment the business is scaling.

Yet many fast-growing companies are still managing multi-jurisdictional compliance through spreadsheets, email threads, and disconnected tools, chasing approvals, working with incomplete data, and losing visibility as they grow. The result is rising risk, slower decision-making, and increasing concern about audit readiness at precisely the moment the business needs confidence.

This white paper is designed for organizations at that inflection point. It explores the most common governance and compliance challenges fast-growing companies face. We set out a practical, step-by-step approach to reducing friction, improving visibility, and enabling faster, safer decisions as you scale. Specifically, the guide follows three stages:

(1) identifies where fragmentation creates risk and delay, (2) explains how cross-border complexity compounds, and (3) adopts a scalable operating model, supported by shared data, clear ownership, and automation to embed compliance into day-to-day work.

In this context, “frictionless” doesn’t mean fewer controls or lighter oversight. It means compliance workflows that are embedded into day-to-day operations, supported by shared data, clear ownership, and automation so teams can surface issues earlier, respond faster, and scale without adding disproportionate cost or risk.

Part 1: The challenge: Why compliance friction emerges as companies scale

The cost of fragmented systems

Legal, tax, risk, and trade teams, often the business-enabling functions that help growth happen safely, have closely interlinked objectives. Research we commissioned among director-level decision-makers found that 80% said cross-departmental collaboration is key to meeting strategic goals.

• Legal compliance requires accurate financial reporting, suitable risk safeguards, and correct trade tariff classifications.
• Tax teams must ensure tax strategies align with legal requirements, that appropriate internal risk controls are in place, and that customs documentation is up to date.
• Risk managers need to ensure tax processes protect against fraud, determine the legal implications if fraud occurs, and be confident that trade operations are optimizing costs and mitigating risk.
• The trade function needs to know that legal contracts address key commercial issues, work with risk management to ensure agreements protect against disruption and achieve favorable tax and trade outcomes.

The impact of disjointed workflows and no single source of truth

The survey also revealed that collaboration between these teams is often disjointed. Legacy technology can create roadblocks, slowing down cross-departmental workflows. As organizations scale, these roadblocks don’t just slow teams down, they hardwire risk, delay decision-making, and limit growth capacity. In addition, data may be poor quality, siloed, or stored in fragmented systems, such as disparate databases, spreadsheets, emails, or documents, so transparency is frequently lacking, and even people within the same department don’t always know where to find the latest information. Most organizations aren’t there yet.

Hurdles to achieving goals include ¹

Figure 1: What’s driving compliance friction at scale?

None of this is uncommon, but for fast-growing companies, it gets harder every quarter as volume, jurisdictions, and scrutiny increase. More than half of respondents reported their organization often lacks the required context to complete cross-functional corporate governance and compliance tasks, and nearly half said their organization lacks a continuous cross-functional view of data and insights.

Factors driving lack of context and visibility ²

Figure 2: Poor visibility and disconnected systems are driving inefficiency, risk, and missed opportunities.

Poor visibility and outdated, disconnected systems create major inefficiencies and the potential for errors, incomplete due diligence, missed intelligence, and lost opportunities. Indeed, according to another commissioned research paper, three key pain points organizations typically experience include:

• Operational inefficiency. Disjointed teams and workflows create duplicated efforts, delays, and higher costs. A reported 55% waste excessive time tracking requests from different platforms.
• Risk exposure. Fragmented compliance functions can cause regulatory non-compliance, resulting in potential fines and damage to institutional reputation, leading to a loss of trust among clients and stakeholders. Up to 45% of organizations report excessive internal follow-ups with other enabling function departments, creating compliance blind spots across critical business decisions requiring input from legal, tax, trade, risk, and HR functions.
• Missed opportunities. Nearly twice as many C-suite leaders said legal and compliance teams contribute only “a little” to business objectives as those seeing significant impact. Without unified insights across compliance functions, organizations fail to capture strategic advantages and miss business opportunities.

The upshot? The commercial cost could be extremely high. Companies need a single source of truth and seamless workflows across business-enabling functions for compliance and competitiveness.

The importance of being audit-ready

Audit readiness is often the moment fast-growing companies realize their compliance model hasn’t kept pace with their growth.

For fast-growing companies, the ultimate test of corporate governance and compliance often comes earlier than expected, at audit time, funding rounds, or regulatory review.

It might have been relatively easy to pull together all the necessary data and documentation required for an audit when the company was still relatively small. But as it builds its customer base, adds to global revenue streams, or enters new domestic and international markets, making sure all the relevant data can be surfaced when required becomes simultaneously more important and more challenging. Regulatory and shareholder scrutiny are likely to intensify just as operations become more complex.

At the $50M+ stage, audit readiness becomes simultaneously more critical and challenging:

• IPO preparation or Series C/D funding rounds demand enterprise-grade documentation
• Regulatory agencies expect sophisticated controls, not start-up informality
• Cross-border operations mean multiple audit regimes with different expectations
• Limited staff means the team conducting the operations is also preparing audit documentation
• The cost of audit findings escalates. A minor issue that might have been forgiven at $50M revenue, but becomes a material concern at $250M+

Searching through email threads, files, folders, spreadsheets, and databases in different places for the correct, up-to-date information simply won’t cut it, and gaps or inconsistencies in reports will not be tolerated either. Companies can’t afford the costs and associated reputational damage that could stem from audit failures, or any remediation requirements or penalties imposed. They must demonstrate audit-readiness and resilience to maintain confidence in the robustness of their systems and operations.

All this is particularly pertinent for fast-growing companies who may have started out relying on spreadsheets and shared drives to store information but are quickly outgrowing these options. As they scale, collecting information from colleagues, manually reconciling data across different systems, and checking and cross-referencing disparate sources becomes too time-consuming and unmanageable, while disjointed workflows create friction, delay, and the potential for inconsistencies. The case for tech tools capable of consolidating data from multiple business units, streamlining processes, and connecting colleagues more closely becomes increasingly compelling as organizations scale.

Navigating cross-border complexities

When companies are embarking on a growth journey, business-enabling teams may still consist of just a few people operating out of the same office, so cooperating with colleagues is relatively easy and the various systems they use are still quite simple to navigate. But as they get bigger and especially as new offices and outlets are opened in new locations in different time zones, collaboration becomes harder if people can’t simply walk down the hall to ask questions or complete workflow tasks so easily.

What’s more, when expansion crosses borders into new states or international jurisdictions, compliance becomes more complex as organizations must adhere to a multitude of obligations in different regions at home and around the world. At the same time, they must manage far greater quantities of data emanating from multiple geographies and mitigate increasingly diverse risks such as sanctions restrictions or tariff changes that may be brought in almost overnight.

Against this backdrop, the business impact of common collaboration challenges between departments, as outlined in our research, is likely to be amplified:

The business impact of collaboration challenges ³

Figure 3: The business impact of cross-border complexity: risk, inefficiency, and missed visibility across functions.

The pressure on resources can be intense. However, as companies scale, technology can take the strain. Instead of hiring more people, investing in tech tools that can automate processes, eliminate roadblocks, and connect people and data more seamlessly makes sense, equipping and empowering teams to do a better job in less time.

Technology solutions can also provide vital cross-jurisdictional intelligence to organizations moving into new locations. They can prepare solid operational and compliance plans that are ready to go from day one, then springboard their success as they take further expansion steps.

Having advanced knowledge at their fingertips facilitates decision-making around where to base new plants or offices in new states or countries, what legal and regulatory requirements need to be considered, what tax regimes apply, what risks such a move presents, and the impact of trade rules. Giving leadership teams confidence that expansion decisions are not introducing unseen legal, tax, or trade exposure.

This information must be accurate, up-to-date, and instantly accessible, and come from reliable, verified sources so businesses can be proactive, make informed choices, and be confident they have covered every base.

Part 2: What frictionless compliance looks like at scale

The benefits of a unified compliance ecosystem vs. standalone tools

This is where an intelligent compliance network approach becomes critical. Rather than adding another tool, organizations need a way to connect tax, trade, legal, and risk workflows, without rebuilding their entire operating model. Before considering any specific solution, fast-growing companies need a clear view of what “good” looks like, and why disconnected tools rarely scale as complexity increases.

Implementing specialized software tools for specific compliance tasks, such as vendor risk management, HR compliance, tax reporting, or supply chain optimization may seem like a good idea to support teams on critical areas of their work. However, unless all these solutions can work together, this approach may in fact fail to reduce complexity and friction in processes.

The solutions themselves may be sophisticated, but deploying multiple fragmented systems makes it almost impossible for cross-functional workflows to be completed seamlessly.

Discrete data models mean data will likely stay siloed, rather than being shared across interconnecting systems, so administrative tasks like searching for data and checking information across multiple systems will remain frustratingly inefficient and burdensome.

User interfaces and access controls will differ across tools, creating potential engagement issues and training implications both for end-users and for IT teams setting solutions up on the back end. What’s more, standalone solutions may not be able to scale appropriately across the business as they expand and its requirements change. For fast-growing companies, this can become a false economy: lower upfront costs, but higher operational drag, duplicated effort, and greater risk over time.

Unlike standalone solutions, a comprehensive compliance solution should enable:

• Friction-free cross-functional, multi-disciplinary workflows
• Seamless data sharing across teams to create a single source of truth
• Consistent access controls and familiar user interface
• A wider universe of capabilities in one place
• New and enhanced functionality to be added to multiple tools at once
• Tools that grow with a business and continue to cater for their changing needs

Benefits of an intelligent compliance network ⁴

Figure 4: The measurable benefits of an intelligent compliance network approach

Streamlining workflows: The case for automation and AI

To collaborate effectively, complete critical tasks more efficiently, create visibility, and optimize operations, enabling functions can benefit significantly from embedding automation and artificial intelligence into their workflows. More than four in ten respondents to our AI Meets Governance And Compliance study identified problems with workflow governance, turnaround times, and coordination.

Widespread challenges in governance, speed, and coordination ⁵

Figure 5: Where workflows break down, and why automation is critical

Meanwhile, 80% of professionals believe AI will have a high or even transformational impact on their profession over the next five years, according to our Future of Professionals report 2025. AI is set to revolutionize many areas of work, not by replacing judgment, but by creating capacity in stretched teams so they can focus on higher value, more strategic, higher-risk decisions.

Areas where it could have the most impact include:

• Facilitating data analytics
• Accelerating research and reporting
• Automating document drafting
• Summarizing files
• Tracking multi-jurisdictional changes to legal regulations, tax reporting requirements, tariffs regimes, and sanctions rules
• Speeding up compliance checks and order fulfilment
• Enhancing due diligence
• Enabling real-time risk detection
• Accelerating fraud investigations
• Improving forecasting and anticipating risks and opportunities

Part 3: The business impact of a unified compliance ecosystem

Departmental benefits

At a departmental level, the benefits of embedding automation and AI into each of these four business-enabling functions’ workflows within a unified ecosystem of legal, tax, trade, and risk solutions include:

Wider business benefits:

Optimizing all these processes has clear knock-on benefits for the wider business. In turn, other C-suite leaders and their teams will be empowered to:

• CEO or Founder. Evaluate new market entry and commercial strategy opportunities with connected regulatory, tax, and trade implications, turning regulatory change into a first-mover advantage. Chief executives can rest assured that ironclad contracts are in place, third parties have been thoroughly screened, and that outside legal counsel spend is contained.
• CFO or Head of Finance. Consolidate tax, legal spend, and risk insights to cut costs, reduce penalties, and accelerate close and reporting cycles. They can have global views of critical financial data and understand their tax positions, optimizing legal entity structure and ensuring they’re adhering to local jurisdiction requirements.
• COO or Operations Director. Detect and resolve enterprise risk blind spots by connecting supply chain, trade, legal, and fraud teams for end-to-end visibility. Then, they can operate faster and save time and money.
• Chief People Officer or Head of HR. Analyze multi-jurisdictional employment obligations, policies, and contracts with AI-assisted research and drafting.

Part 4: Moving from insight to action a phased path forward

ONESOURCE+ — The advantage of an AI-powered intelligent compliance network

For fast-growing companies, progress doesn’t come from ripping and replacing systems overnight. It comes from prioritizing the workflows that create the most friction today, connecting them first, and building from there as scale and complexity increase.

The tool ONESOURCE+ from Thomson Reuters transforms this fragmented set of cost centers into a unified source of competitive advantage by creating an AI-powered intelligent compliance network. Connecting these vital functions in a single suite of solutions and embedding compliance into everyday workflows drives operational efficiency at scale, builds resilience against risk, and reveals strategic growth-driving insights that can only emerge when disparate data sources are transformed into a single, powerful source of truth.

ONESOURCE+ helps fast-growing companies move from fragmented to frictionless by connecting people, workflows, and data across tax, legal, risk, and trade, starting with the highest-friction processes first, such as onboarding, screening, filings, contracts, and evidence capture.

 When assessing any intelligent network, organizations at this scale should prioritize:

• Modular implementation; starting with highest pain workflows
• Integration with existing systems like an ERP or CRM
• Scalability to support growth
• Vendor support for multi-jurisdictional complexity
• Training and change-management resources

Unlike point solutions or bolt-on AI interfaces, ONESOURCE+ is built on our unique, cross-domain AI model, grounded in authoritative content, premium data, and unparalleled expertise, underpinned by enterprise-grade security. Its core capabilities include:

• Automated compliance workflows 
• Real-time fraud detection and alerts
• AI-powered legal research and summarization 
• Centralized data across departments
• ERP and inventory system integrations

It creates a unified, intelligent ecosystem, not just by bringing multiple Thomson Reuters solutions together in one place, but by integrating with other business-critical third-party tools such as e-invoicing solutions. Trusted by fast-growing and global organizations, including teams navigating multi-jurisdictional complexity for the first time, ONESOURCE+ helps simplify compliance and strengthen decision-making across enabling functions.

ONESOURCE+ delivers value where fast-growing companies feel pressure most — speed, risk reduction, and scalability: ⁶

• Payback in under six months, enabling time to value without large-scale system replacement
• Up to 20 hours saved per month per employee by reducing manual, repetitive compliance work
• Significant reduction in fraud, errors, and compliance gaps, strengthening control as complexity increases
• Faster processing and decision-making through AI driven summaries, scoring, dashboards, and alerts
• Significant ROI — up to 200% over three years — with reduced reliance on legacy systems and manual workarounds

The result is scalable, defensible compliance that supports growth without adding proportional headcount or risk.

Alongside these metrics, ONESOURCE+ has delivered significant value in many other areas such as:

• Legal research accelerated. AI tools reduce research time by up to 60%
• Global expansion enabled. Automated compliance supports new markets without delays
• Real-time decision-making. Dashboards and alerts flag issues instantly
• Vendor negotiations improved. Centralized data drives better contract terms
• Digital transformation. Seamless ERP and inventory integrations

Conclusion

The pressures of staying on top of complex compliance obligations and grappling with today’s dynamic market conditions are magnified when businesses are expanding in size and scope. Fragmented, friction-heavy systems become more burdensome and inefficient than ever when multiple locations are involved, while risk is simultaneously heightened. Business demands for real-time visibility, accurate reporting, clear advice, and robust risk management become louder and more urgent.

Tax, legal, risk, and trade teams must deliver strategic value while ensuring all the fundamental regulatory requirements of their role are met. For fast-growing companies, the mission is practical. They must reduce friction, surface implications earlier, and stay audit-ready while enabling growth to continue at pace. This method is how fast-growing companies move from fragmented compliance to frictionless operations, supporting scale, speed, and confidence across every jurisdiction.

As organizations extend their reach, they must not overlook the fact that these compliance functions, if properly unified, can deliver significant competitive advantage and facilitate growth. They should be seen as the business enablers they are, and empowered to make a tangible, measurable difference to the business by operating seamlessly as one.

ONESOURCE+ provides a step-by-step path to unity, connects the workflows you need now, adds automation where it reduces manual work, and scales as jurisdictions and volume increase.

With its vast and diverse repository of trusted content and data, proven enterprise-grade AI, market-leading security, and expandable ecosystem, it transforms disconnected cost centers into true sources of value.

For fast-growing companies, the mission is practical — move from fragmented compliance to frictionless operations that support scale, speed, and confidence across every jurisdiction.

Learn how fast-growing companies are simplifying multi-jurisdictional compliance and enabling faster, safer growth with ONESOURCE+

Sources

1. https://www.thomsonreuters.com/content/dam/ewp-m/documents/thomsonreuters/en/pdf/other/tr-forrester-report-infographic.pdf
2. 3 , 4. 5. AI Meets Governance And Compliance: Enabling Cross-Functional Intelligence To Accelerate Strategic Execution,” Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper commissioned by Thomson Reuters, October 2025.
6. + A Forrester Consulting Total Economic impact™ study commissioned by Thomson Reuters, October 2025. (Results are for a composite organization based on interviewed customers.)