The engineering question isn’t “are you compliant?” — it’s:

How do you embed compliance into the system without touching the hot path?

At DIVEXA Exchange, compliance is treated as infrastructure rather than paperwork.

Execution vs. Governance Isolation

A common pattern in performance-sensitive systems:

Matching engine runs on a latency-optimized hot path

Compliance services consume replicated event streams asynchronously

Audit logs are append-only

Reporting layers operate on read replicas

This keeps order matching deterministic while allowing surveillance systems to scale independently.

AML as a Streaming Problem

AML isn’t a document workflow — it’s real-time analytics.

Instead of blocking execution, monitoring systems analyze:

Behavioral anomalies

Rapid balance shifts

Cross-account correlations

Threshold-trigger events

All of this happens off the execution path.

Governance as Access Control

Many exchange failures are internal.

From a systems perspective, compliance becomes:

Principle-of-least-privilege access

Segmented admin roles

Multi-party authorization for sensitive actions

Immutable privileged activity logs

These are enforceable system rules — not policy PDFs.

The Hard Part: Adaptability

Regulation changes faster than infrastructure.

The exchanges that survive long-term are likely those that modularize compliance logic instead of hard-coding it into core trading systems.

Performance gets attention. Compliance ensures survivability.

Curious how others here architect regulatory layers in latency-sensitive systems.