Xapien transformation stories is a series of conversations with senior professionals across risk, compliance, legal and intelligence. We asked them all the same question: what does genuinely good due diligence look like now, and what does it take to get there?
Nicola Mollat, Partner, Forensic & Integrity Services at Ernst & Young on how compliance teams become “marshals of technology”
After 15 years in the industry, Nicola has watched technology dramatically transform compliance.
At the same time, her clients at EY are under major pressure to investigate more third parties, on faster timelines, and with shrinking budgets. To meet the demand, compliance teams across the industry are often told to “just use AI” by senior leaders. But AI isn’t a magic button… it takes intention to actually map technology onto current processes. Between board-level expectations and the compliance-level reality of high-quality implementation, there is a clear gap.
To bring AI in well, Nicola explains the importance of mapping the problem before reaching for technology. Teams gravitate toward an “easy button” solution to remedy a classic trade-off: too many third parties, with not enough time. The problem here is that it leads teams to overlook seemingly lower risk cases, opening space for major issues to slip through the cracks. AI bridges this gap for “low-risk” cases and enables humans to give attention to genuinely high-risk cases, where local knowledge and expert judgement are irreplaceable.
AI challenges us to keep reinventing ourselves to become marshals of technology.
For Nicola, humans will never be obsolete in compliance. Human judgment remains an essential component of an effective AI-enabled compliance programme — from designing and building a proportionate approach to analysing the results. AI enables people to devote their time to applying expertise where it’s most valuable, leading to higher quality work, faster.
This is the fourth in our Transformation Stories series, where compliance leaders share how they’re reshaping due diligence at their organisations. Watch the interview with Nicola Mollat above or on our YouTube channel.
Xapien automates due diligence research on people and companies, delivering fully sourced risk reports in minutes instead of days. The platform frees humans from wasting their time on low-risk cases, and enables them to do what they do best: applying local knowledge and expert judgement. If you’d like to see what that looks like for your organisation, book a demo today.
