Fragmented compliance stacks break at the handoffs between systems. Each tool can work as designed while investigators rebuild context by hand, ownership blurs between teams, and reviewers lose sight of what was known when a decision was made. This report names that rework and lost visibility the fragmentation tax, and shows why tool count doesn’t predict it: a modular stack can avoid it, and a consolidated platform can still pay it. It gives AML and FCC leaders five continuity tests, a six-step path to modernize without losing coverage, and twelve questions for an architecture review.