Time to read: 3 minutes
TL;DR: AI is radically accelerating how software is built and sold, forcing organisations to rethink teams, workflows, and enterprise buying from the ground up. In regulated financial services, speed without control isn’t viable, firms need platforms that embed governance, risk, and compliance directly into day-to-day workflows while maintaining full auditability.
As software fees face pressure and buy-vs-build thresholds rise, defensibility shifts from coding ability to deep domain expertise, integrated platforms, and clear ROI. The winners will be those who plan for constant change, shorten sales cycles through self-serve assurance, and enable faster decisions without compromising regulatory evidence, exactly the gap Ruleguard is designed to close.
AI tooling is collapsing build cycles and transforming GTM motions. But this isn’t about bolting AI onto existing processes, it’s about deconstructing teams and reimagining workflows from the ground up to become genuinely AI-native.
This is exactly why compliance, risk, and regulatory change can no longer be treated as back-office afterthoughts. When change is constant, organisations need systems that embed governance into everyday workflows rather than slowing them down. That’s the problem we focus on solving at Ruleguard.
If software is being built faster than ever, but procurement still takes 9–12 months, something has to give. Firms that make it easy for buyers to self-serve due diligence will win.
We see this first-hand in regulated financial services. Our clients need to move quickly, but they also need to evidence every decision - for regulators, auditors, and internal stakeholders. The winners will be platforms that deliver both speed and auditability, not one at the expense of the other.
For teams grappling with this challenge, we’ve published a number of practical resources on regulatory change management, audit readiness, and governance at scale.
AI is lowering the cost of building, which means more competitors and more cost-plus alternatives. Clients will demand transparency on ROI, and rightly so. The days of opaque SaaS pricing are numbered.
This puts pressure on vendors to clearly demonstrate value, outcomes, and efficiency gains. In regulated environments, that value increasingly shows up as reduced manual effort, fewer control gaps, and stronger evidence trails, not just feature velocity.
Bought software must be demonstrably 10x better than what a team could build in-house, especially as AI makes internal tooling faster to spin up.
This is where platforms beat point solutions. Buyers want fewer vendors, integrated use-cases, and ecosystems, not another login. In compliance and risk, fragmentation is no longer just inefficient; it actively increases operational and regulatory risk.
If AI does coding for you, defensibility has to come from somewhere else: proprietary data, network effects, or models trained on niche domains.
(And before you dismiss this as another CEO discovering AI over a weekend, I’ve been a systems developer and software architect for 30 years, managed hundreds of developers, and Claude Code with Opus 4.5 still blows my mind!)
In RegTech, domain depth and regulatory context matter. Generic tooling isn’t enough, solutions need to understand how rules change, how controls map, and how decisions must be evidenced over time.
How do you plan a year when you can’t predict what the world looks like in 12 months?
The answer from the room was clear: prioritise skills and structures that are flexible, responsive, and continuously delivering value. Treat previously static parameters, like your ICP - as dynamic, signal-driven, and constantly evolving.
This mindset shift is just as relevant for governance, risk, and compliance teams as it is for product and GTM leaders.
Great event, and a reminder that the SaaS leaders who thrive won’t be the ones with all the answers, they’ll be the ones asking better cross-functional questions.
As AI accelerates change across products and processes, governance, risk, and compliance teams are under pressure to approve decisions faster, while maintaining clear regulatory evidence.
Ruleguard helps financial services firms bridge that gap, enabling faster change while remaining compliant, auditable, and regulator-ready.
Discover how Ruleguard supports AI-era governance in financial services.