Every compliance leader knows the pain of global expansion.

You’re launching a product into three new markets and suddenly you’re juggling five regulators, nine overlapping rulebooks, and a spreadsheet that’s grown into a monster. The regulations might be addressing the same underlying risks - but the wording, expectations, and reporting obligations vary just enough to require weeks of legal review and months of operational planning.

This is the reality for regulated firms operating across borders. Fragmentation isn’t a surprise. It’s the default.

However, the democratisation of AI is now allowing firms to manage this much more effectively.

GenAI can now parse hundreds of pages of regulation across jurisdictions and languages - and extract obligations with context. On top of that, knowledge graphs connect obligations to internal policies, controls, products, and entities - so you’re not just reading rules, you’re applying them across your organisation.

These technologies together form the backbone of what we’re building at Cardamon. It’s not about replacing legal & compliance teams - it’s about giving them superpowers. Our platform enables global firms to trace a regulatory change from a foreign-language consultation paper all the way through to a control gap in their payment flow.

Normalising Legal Standards Across Borders

One of the core challenges is that regulators often speak in slightly different dialects - even when they’re regulating the same thing. KYC in the EU is not the same as AML in Singapore. Suitability in the UK might overlap with investor protection in the US - but the standards, tests, and expectations aren’t interchangeable.

Good RegTech platforms abstract this complexity by leveraging GenAI to extract similarities and differences - of course, the infrastructure has to be in place, the correct tools have to be applied, and the context has to be spot on. It’s not about boiling the ocean or forcing convergence. It’s about surfacing the 80 percent that’s harmonisable - and flagging the 20 percent that’s jurisdiction-specific.

What are the biggest pain points in cross-border compliance today?

The biggest friction points in cross-border compliance today include:

• Duplicated efforts across local compliance teams

  
  

• Language barriers and need for local expertise to deal with nuances
  
  

• Manual and inconsistent regulatory interpretations
  
  

• Difficulty keeping product and policy teams aligned across markets
  
  

• No central view of how global obligations are implemented
  
  
  

Many firms rely on consulting reports, local counsel, or PDF trackers to fill the gaps. But these approaches don’t scale, and worse - they often result in divergence between what the business thinks is happening and what the regulator expects.

With AI-powered platforms, firms can finally get a single source of regulatory truth - and tie that directly to controls, product specs, and even training materials.

Is Regulatory Convergence Coming?

In some areas, yes - think Basel III, FATF, IOSCO principles, and the EU’s push toward pan-European regulation. But in practice, fragmentation is not going away - after all, local regulators, whether state or country level, aren’t paid to just adopt pan-country level guidelines! If anything, we’re seeing regulators adopt shared goals but implement them in wildly different ways.

The smart money isn’t betting on harmonisation. It’s investing in agility - the ability to adapt quickly to whatever shape the regulation takes, wherever it comes from.

That’s the model we’ve built Cardamon around. One that lets global compliance teams act local without starting from scratch every time.

Global compliance isn’t about translating rules. It’s about translating intent - and turning that into repeatable action across your business. With the right tech stack, it’s no longer an impossible ask.

The firms who win in this space won’t be the ones with the most headcount. They’ll be the ones with the clearest source of truth - and the shortest path from regulatory change to business action