How ACE + Company makes regulatory AI work: pairing platform with domain expertise
The RegTech team of ACE + Company brings together professionals from diverse backgrounds – including software engineers, data scientists, AI experts, a UX designer, consultants, and regulatory specialists – to help financial institutions digitally transform regulatory complexity into clarity and efficiency.
The key mission of ACE + Company’s RegTech team is one that will resonate with leaders across the financial services industry: bringing clarity and simplicity to an increasingly complex regulatory landscape.
To put the challenge into perspective: every year, more than 50,000 pages of regulatory text are published globally for financial institutions, covering areas such as prudential requirements, operational resilience frameworks, reporting obligations, and conduct standards. This regulatory growth is cumulative, adding further complexity on top of an already extensive compliance baseline.
“The rapidly growing volume of regulations is putting immense pressure on compliance organisations, especially those that are already stretched thin. Add to this that regulatory talent in the market is scarce, while financial institutions are simultaneously facing many other challenges that rely on the same resources, and the case for technology becomes clear,” says Nick Prince, Practice Leader of the RegTech team.
This development, combined with the rapid rise of technological capabilities, has made technology an increasingly indispensable part of modern regulatory operations. “The pressure to adopt technology that can meaningfully absorb and act on the rapidly growing volume of regulations is no longer a nice-to-have. It has become a business necessity.”
Generative AI opportunities
At ACE + Company, the team sees first-hand how Generative AI is becoming a powerful enabler of RegTech. By accelerating complex compliance tasks, analysing vast amounts of regulatory information, and identifying risks faster and more accurately, AI can help organisations strengthen regulatory monitoring, reporting, and management while reducing manual effort and operational costs.
“By combining AI-driven insights with human expertise, financial institutions can become more proactive, agile, and effective in managing regulatory requirements,” explains Prince.
Mehul Mistry, a Data Scientist within the team, highlights how ACE + Company takes a client-focused and integrated approach to developing GenAI-powered RegTech solutions. “We don’t build tools in isolation. We translate complex regulatory knowledge into systems that clients can actually use. The discussions between consultants, subject matter experts, and the technology team are often where the best ideas emerge.”
One of the key milestones for the RegTech team was the launch of its proprietary RegAI platform. The platform enables compliance teams to continuously monitor and interpret complex regulations, accelerating decision-making while supporting impact assessments and identifying required actions.
Regulatory expertise
In its work with clients, Prince emphasises that ACE + Company’s approach goes beyond simply developing technology solutions. The focus is equally on ensuring that these solutions deliver value in practice and become embedded into daily operations.
The process starts with a deep understanding of the organisation, its regulatory environment, and its business challenges before technology is developed. “The barrier to effective AI adoption in financial services is not access to the technology. It is the scarcity of deep regulatory expertise required to make that technology behave with the precision and accountability that a regulated institution demands.”
Prince continues: “The magic lies in the rigorous, often unglamorous work required to build the connective tissue that makes AI models appropriate, effective, and safe to use.”
Another major challenge is that regulatory text is often highly complex to interpret. Regulations are dense, interconnected, and heavily dependent on context.
Luuk Wagenaar, Senior Data Scientist within the team, provides an example: “Each article within a regulation contains cross-references, sometimes to other sections of the same regulatory instrument, but more often to entirely separate regulations. Retrieving and correctly interpreting the context behind those references is essential to producing complete and well-defined requirements.”
“Generating clear, structured requirements from dense regulatory text requires interpretation, precision, and continuous validation,” adds Rishikesh Ramachandran, also part of ACE’s data science team. “In doing so, it is essential that structure, traceability, and data logic are treated as fundamental pillars of the approach.”
Harsh Pundhir, Data Scientist in the team, recalls an example from his own experience. He worked on an initiative to transform the European Banking Authority’s Data Point Model into a knowledge graph, using natural language processing to make it searchable through a conversational interface within the RegAI platform.
“At the time, the tooling ecosystem for this type of work was still immature. That meant we were genuinely pioneering. Making it function reliably required sustained effort and a methodical approach to problem-solving. Ultimately, this resulted in the RegAI platform being able to answer increasingly complex questions accurately, expanding its capabilities from simple queries to more advanced regulatory analysis.”
“The challenge of generating structured regulatory requirements from new legislation can be immensely complex,” adds Prince. “While AI can enable this process, deep subject matter expertise is what ultimately makes the difference.”
Integrated disciplines
That regulatory expertise, however, cannot exist in isolation. “Success requires genuine integration between regulatory expertise and technical capability,” notes Prince.
Jakob Tjurlik, a Technical Business Analyst, operates precisely at the intersection of these two worlds. His role is to translate business and regulatory needs into structured solution logic that development teams can build upon. “My job is translating client needs into structured solution logic the team can build on. It’s a bit like being bilingual: you don’t just translate words, you translate meaning.”
“That bridging role ensures that the output of the technical team remains anchored in real regulatory and operational requirements, rather than simply reflecting what is technically convenient.”
In his client work, Harsis Yadav, Senior Software Developer within the team, observes that the willingness to genuinely integrate regulatory and technical knowledge is becoming increasingly accepted across the industry. “Most companies are risk-averse when it comes to technology and AI. But we’re seeing more and more compliance teams embrace tools and experiment with AI to make their operations more effective.”
“We bring together professionals from diverse backgrounds to help financial institutions turn regulatory complexity into clarity and efficiency.”
Transparency as a design factor
Throughout the development journey, ACE + Company places transparency at the heart of its approach. “The key is that clients do not receive a tool that operates as a black box. Instead, it should function as a fully transparent glass box”, explains Prince.
This transparency is supported by a fully traceable process. “We call this the ‘golden thread’ in our work. It means we create a technical audit trail that connects a legislative requirement directly to a specific data field within a client’s infrastructure.”
The benefit of this approach is according to him significant. “For an institution that must be able to demonstrate to a supervisor exactly why a particular compliance decision was made, this kind of end-to-end traceability is not an optional feature – it is a prerequisite for deploying AI with confidence in a regulated environment. We consider this approach a non-negotiable standard for every project.”
Usability as a compliance consideration
Once the technology is developed, its success is ultimately measured by how effectively it is adopted and used in daily operations.
Leonie Hermans, UX Designer within the RegTech team, highlights the importance of usability. “For RegTech solutions to succeed, they also need to be intuitive, accessible, and visually appealing. In a landscape where many tools feel complex and purely functional, creating solutions that stand out and become the preferred tools for users is increasingly important.”
“The quality of the user experience is becoming a material factor in adoption, accuracy, and audit readiness.”
Examples of projects
Over the past decade, ACE + Company has delivered more than 50 projects for clients across the financial services sector. The team oversees multiple solutions that are actively running on a daily basis within financial institutions.
Its projects cover a broad range of regulatory challenges, from regulatory monitoring and reporting automation to the development of AI-powered solutions that improve compliance processes and decision-making.
Technology and accountability
For senior leaders in financial institutions looking to professionalise their compliance operations, Prince believes technology will play a central role in the future. “Technology is indispensable. But the questions around this journey should extend far beyond the technology itself. They should focus on accountability and governance: who is responsible for the output, how it can be interrogated, and whether the system can withstand regulatory scrutiny.”
“At ACE + Company, our team has been built around precisely those questions. We do not apply our regulatory knowledge after the technology has been built. We embed that knowledge into the architecture from the outset, ensuring that solutions and processes are developed in close collaboration with compliance professionals and that every output is traceable.”
“As financial institutions continue to navigate increasing regulatory complexity, the organisations that succeed will be those that combine technological capability with deep regulatory expertise, strong governance, and a clear focus on practical adoption.”
