How ACE + Company makes regulatory AI actually work

The regulatory burden facing financial institutions is not a problem that will simplify itself. Each year, more than 50,000 pages of regulatory text are published globally, spanning prudential requirements, operational resilience frameworks, reporting obligations and conduct standards. For compliance functions already stretched thin, the pressure to adopt technology that can meaningfully absorb and act on that volume is real and growing.

ACE + Company is an Amsterdam-based RegTech company, complemented by regulatory change & subject matter expertise, with a focus on the financial sector. At the centre of its regtech offering is a dedicated team of software engineers, data scientists/AI engineers, designers and regulatory experts, led by Nick Prince.

A Deliberate Approach to AI Adoption

ACE’s position on Generative AI is one of deliberate, evidence-based adoption rather than market-driven enthusiasm. When the technology began attracting serious attention, the team did not treat it as a trend to be monitored. They began working with it immediately and invested in understanding – with rigour – how it could be applied responsibly to regulatory work.

That early commitment has produced something that cannot be acquired quickly: a team that is fluent in both the technology and the domain it is being applied to.

Mehul, the data science lead on the RegTech team, reflects on what that combination enables in practice: “We are not building tools in isolation. We translate complex regulatory knowledge into systems that clients can actually use. The discussions between consultants, SMEs, and the tech team are often where the best ideas come from.” He points to a defining moment: securing ACE’s first subscription to the RegAI platform. “We did not win it because of a long list of existing features. We won it because the client trusted that we could build something new for them based on our existing platform. When you combine solid regulatory knowledge, strong technical capability, and a clear understanding of client needs, you can create something meaningful and commercially viable.”

Expertise as Architecture

Nick Prince is direct about the core challenge that any serious RegTech solution must address. The barrier to effective AI adoption in financial services is not access to the technology. It is the scarcity of the deep regulatory expertise required to make that technology behave with the precision and accountability that a regulated institution requires.

“In a market drowning in AI hype, our team’s superpower is their grip on reality,” he says. “The magic isn’t in the AI model itself. It’s in the rigorous, often unglamorous work our technicians and SMEs do to build the connective tissue that makes that model safe for a bank to use. We aren’t building a black box; we’re building a glass one.”

That commitment to transparency and traceability takes a concrete form in what ACE calls the “golden thread”: a technical audit trail that connects a legislative requirement directly to a specific data field in a client’s infrastructure. 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. It is also, as Nick acknowledges, exact and unglamorous work. That is precisely the point.

The long-term vision the team is working towards is what Nick describes as an autonomous “Regulatory Nervous System”: a system capable of processing, interpreting and operationalising regulatory change across an institution’s entire infrastructure in close to real time. The path to that vision is being built through the deliberate, verifiable automation of compliance processes today.

Technical Depth, Applied to Real Complexity

The problems the team works on are rarely as straightforward as they first appear. Regulatory text is dense, interconnected and context-dependent in ways that generic AI approaches are not equipped to handle.

Luuk – senior data scientist in the team, describes the challenge of building a pipeline to generate structured regulatory requirements from new legislation. What might appear to be a summarisation task quickly reveals itself as something consideraably more demanding. Each article within a regulation contains cross-references, sometimes to other sections of the same instrument, more often to separate regulations entirely. Retrieving and correctly interpreting the context behind those references is essential to producing a complete and well-defined requirement. “Since we’re working in such a niche area, we have to come up with a lot of innovative ideas since nobody before us tried to do something like this.”

Rishi – also in the data science team, has worked on both the content pipeline and the process of mapping regulations to the Data Point Model, two technically distinct and demanding workstreams. “Generating clear, structured requirements from dense regulatory text requires interpretation, precision, and constant validation. Mapping regulations to the Data Point Model is a different layer of complexity, where structure, traceability, and data logic become critical.” He has also worked directly alongside clients to configure RegAI for their specific regulatory and operational contexts. “Those collaborations highlight what we’re capable of as a tech team, not just building a system but shaping it, so it truly works in the real world.”

Harsh, Data Scientist, joined ACE as an intern in 2023 and worked on a project that has since become foundational to the platform: transforming the European Banking Authority’s Data Point Model into a knowledge graph and applying natural language processing to make it query-able in a conversational interface. At the time, the tooling ecosystem for this kind of work was still immature. Making it function reliably required sustained effort and methodical problem-solving. “The best part was the moment it started answering questions correctly. I genuinely remember celebrating small wins every time it got a complex query right.”

The Value of Integrated Disciplines

A consistent theme across the team is the premium placed on genuine integration between regulatory expertise and technical capability. This is not a matter of process or methodology. It is a structural conviction about how trustworthy compliance technology has to be built.

Jakob, Technical Business Analyst, describes his function as bridging the gap between what a client needs and what a technical team can build. “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 is what ensures the output of the technical team remains anchored to real regulatory and operational requirements rather than to what is technically convenient.

Harsis, Senior Software Developer, observes that the willingness to genuinely integrate regulatory and technical knowledge is rarer than it might appear across the industry. “Most companies are risk-averse when it comes to AI. At ACE, it has been a pleasant surprise to see people embracing so many AI tools and boldly experimenting with what makes the team more productive.” He notes too those traditional ways of working, both in software development and in consultancy, are being disrupted simultaneously. ACE has chosen to navigate that disruption by combining both disciplines rather than treating them separately.

Usability as a Compliance Consideration

The quality of a compliance tool is ultimately measured by how effectively it is used under operational conditions. An interface that is difficult to navigate or unintuitive to interpret imposes its own compliance risk, regardless of the sophistication of the system beneath it.

Leonie, UX Designer, works at the intersection of client insight, regulatory context and product execution. Her most significant contribution to date is a complete redesign of RegAI, a cross-functional effort that reconsidered the platform’s usability from the ground up. The measure of its success came directly from clients. “What makes me most proud is the feedback from clients who told us that it genuinely makes a difference for them, that it’s not only functional, but also easy to use and visually appealing. In a landscape where many tools feel complex and purely functional, creating something that stands out in both usability and design is something I’m truly proud to have contributed to.”
In a sector where compliance tools have historically been evaluated on functional coverage alone, the quality of the user experience is increasingly recognised as a material factor in adoption, accuracy and audit-readiness.

What This Means for Financial Institutions

For senior leaders in financial institutions evaluating AI-powered compliance solutions, the relevant questions are not primarily technical. They are about accountability: who is responsible for the output, how it can be interrogated, and whether the system will hold up under regulatory scrutiny.

ACE’s RegTech team has been built around precisely those questions. The regulatory knowledge is not applied after the technology is built. It is embedded in the architecture from the outset. Every output is traceable. Every capability has been developed in close collaboration with the compliance professionals who will depend on it. The ambition is significant. The foundations are substantive. And the team building them has the depth of expertise to be taken seriously.

ACE’s RegTech team develops and maintains RegAI, a cutting-edge GenAI-enabled compliance workbench built for financial institutions navigating regulatory change.