AI Platform and GRC Support Solutions, by 4CRisk

4CRisk delivers its solutions on the foundation of its AI platform, to which industry-leading construction principles and technology approaches have been applied, providing customers with built-in assurance of a fit with their standards and policies. Assurance features range across the areas of Responsible AI, Trustworthy AI and Zero-Trust Security principles in data security, protection and auditability. These ensure privacy of sensitive data, keeping it secure within a SaaS platform, never used to train models nor exposed to the public domain, while leveraging role-based access controls to protect customer information.

The platform is certified on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud environments, and can also fit with customer-specific configurations including private cloud. It supports integration with business systems, content providers, and third parties using REST API architecture, and supports standard data export mechanisms (PDF and Excel). Large and complex data (unstructured and structured, including PDFs) can be extracted and ingested.  A human-in-the-loop process allows subject matter experts to review and improve AI predictions over time. Private and secure deployment ensures data sovereignty and confidentiality within organizations.

The company has deliberately created and trained domain-specific small language models (SLMs) to underpin the platform, as these are more suitable than LLMs for specific tasks, and can provide a safe and secure private environment, with role-based access and audit trails, as well as minimized bias, more beneficial cost metrics, quality, ESG impact, and response performance.

The current range of 4CRisk products supported by the platform is as follows:

• Regulatory Research, which connects with over 2,300 global AI-generated sources of regulations, rules, laws and standards, merged across applicable sources, and identifies those which apply to areas of an organization’s business, to build AI-curated rule books.
• Regulatory Change Management, which applies AI-based automation to identify relevant changes, extract obligations, automate applicability and impact analysis; identify regulatory exposure, and raise incidents before they become issues.
• Compliance Map, which streamlines the assessment and prioritization of compliance gaps, by reviewing AI-generated mappings of rulebooks (regulations, laws and standards) to governance artifacts (policies, procedures, contracts and controls), flagging potential risk areas within contracts, documents, and processes based on configurable criteria. It also provides excellently visualized analysis and traceability of compliance links.
• Ask ARIA Co-Pilot, an AI assistant which provides immediate, relevant AI-generated answers to complex queries for the front and second line by analysing an organization’s documents, applicable regulations and risk events such as policies, procedures, complaints or contracts saving up to 90% of research time and effort.

Customer Quotes

“We were able to cut the time to build our rulebook by 75% with 4CRisk’s Regulatory Research product. Importantly, we can collaborate across teams, through 4CRisk’s engaging user interface.”
Compliance Team, Financial firm

“If we had mapped 50 compliance documents (policies, standards, procedures), to NIST CSF, it would have been a 6-month project for an SME. With 4CRisk we mapped these in 4 days.”
Guidewire, Top 25 Insurance Fintech

The platform supports integration with over 2,500 authoritative content sources worldwide (on regulations, laws, standards, etc.), and leverages AI to automatically transform the complex wording into rulebooks applicable to the organisation. These document the obligations that arise from the organization’s business and jurisdictional (geographical) context, expressed in comprehensible business language and usable in end-user policy content.

Fig 1 – Compliance traceability analysis diagram

The same content sources also provide updates on upcoming changes to regulations, rules, laws and standards, which are used by 4CRisk to analyze and prioritize the resulting impacts on the organization’s compliance and risk management processes. Both current and future status of how compliance obligations are met by policies and controls can be visualized using Sankey diagrams (see example in Figure 1). These illustrate the links from higher levels in the hierarchy of compliance (e.g. regulations or obligations), to the operational artifacts that satisfy the obligation (i.e. policies and controls). The items referenced on either side of the mapping are dynamically accessible (as HTML or PDF content). The lines representing links between artifacts are coloured green if the organization meets that requirement, yellow if satisfying the obligation needs some action, or red if a weakness is identified. This easily comprehensible guidance can be used to prioritize human scrutiny of the results – and all output data from the AI model or AI-driven processes includes a ‘confidence score’, which can similarly be used to guide inspection and action. Any of the analysis or data produced can be exported into the organization’s main GRC solution, or compliance practice.

4CRisk supports a short proof-of-concept exercise (branded AI Agile Evaluation Plan), enabling potential customers to test the possible benefits in their own organization. Evaluation focuses on measuring benefits and ROI from sample operations of potentially high-value use cases. ROI calculation tools are available for individual and grouped use cases.

While the growing regulatory burden has driven risk and compliance management to become much more critical to all organizations in recent years, most GRC technology solutions have not taken leaps forward in helping to transform efficiency due to the unstructured nature of information. 4CRisk has expertly applied AI to digitize this information and could complement and integrate any GRC solution to achieve this.

Its customer implementations are proof of 4CRisk helping to achieve significant-scale savings of effort and cost, across the most work-intensive GRC tasks – and it offers a well-packaged evaluation program to enable organisations to test the benefits for themselves.

Beyond the potential savings it can help to achieve, Bloor Research sees 4CRisk as likely to reach another key objective of risk/compliance managers – namely, to help organizations democratize the knowledge and devolve the responsibility for these critical functions. The comprehensible and accessible visualization within 4CRisk of how compliance and risk management are operationalized is the clearest representation of these complex areas in the market to date – plus, employees can use Ask Aria Co-pilot to answer questions and request their own customized insights into the risk/compliance structure, and the underlying policy and regulatory framework and responsibilities.