The compliance function in your financial services business is doing its job. The question I want to ask is whether the commercial function has been given enough room to do its job around it, and whether the answer to that has become so accepted internally that nobody thinks to question it anymore.
Compliance and commercial performance are not naturally in conflict. They are in conflict inside organisations where the compliance function learned to say no to commercial initiatives faster than the commercial function learned to design around the constraints. Over time that dynamic produces a commercial team that stops proposing ambitious things, not because ambition is gone but because the muscle memory of the answer has made the proposal feel pointless before it is written.
The result is a commercial system that is compliant and cautious in a market rewarding businesses that found a way to be compliant and bold simultaneously. That distinction is structural. It sits in how the two functions were designed to relate to each other.
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