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In this era of digitalisation, companies are no longer bound by geographical locations or time zones when it comes to acquiring customers, so it should come as no surprise that businesses are expanding across borders at an unprecedented rate. Despite the ease and convenience that come with connectivity, concern for regulatory compliance has also skyrocketed. As recorded by
PwC’s 27th CEO Survey, 64% of business leaders saw the complexity of compliance framework as the number one barrier to creating and capturing value.
For Vistra, a global corporate service provider, this universal customer pain point served as a call to action. With regulations differing country to country, combined with the intricacies of an ever-changing business landscape, staying compliant while maintaining core business operations is challenging for most multinational corporations.
In Vistra’s own 2025 survey of 250+ APAC executive respondents from Hong Kong, China and Singapore, Vistra 2030, the two factors presenting the greatest challenges to company’s growth prospects over the next 12 months are changes in the global economy and changing compliance. In partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company embarked upon a digital transformation journey to develop its proprietary global compliance platform, debuting the Global Expansion Platform (GEP) and Geni, the world’s first global compliance AI advisor, in March 2025.
Blending AI Productivity with Human Expertise
By creating a unified platform centralising multi-country corporate governance solutions, Vistra has taken another step to further its mission in supporting businesses from all around the world. With the goal to make operating anywhere feel borderless and frictionless, clients are now able to manage entity portfolios across 300+ jurisdictions in one place. Having embedded Geni, its 24/7 AI compliance advisor within GEP, the digital-first approach enables real-time assistance and advisory guidance with instant response.
However, many still see human interaction as a necessity for good customer service. According to the
Callvu AI in Customer Service Report in 2024, 81% of consumers indicated willingness to wait for a live agent, with 16% even prepared to wait for more than 11 minutes, despite the option to speak to a bot immediately. That said, the same study concluded that AI assistants had superior patience and consistency in accuracy, gaining a slight edge over human counterparts in getting swift responses for simple questions.
For companies that are still on the fence, a two-pronged approach to customer services appears to be favourable, allowing AIs to take on elementary issues at little to no expense. Echoing this sentiment,
Simon Webster, CEO of Vistra Group, explains, “The Global Expansion Platform acts as the very first layer of compliance advisory, so that our clients can take full advantage of Vistra’s knowledge base. Geni does not guess or hallucinate: if she does not know the answer, she is honest and says so, directing the customer to an expert inside the organisation.”
Shifting Focus from Products to Customer Success
Webster brought to life a decidedly ambitious organisational change that has spanned up to eighteen months. Going beyond the creation of GEP, the project had signalled a deeper commitment to embedding a customer-obsessed mindset across the board. Instead of letting Vistra’s services and offerings take centre stage, the new direction sees the company shift towards a more technology-driven future to enable customer success. By taking on non-core activities and the overhead burden from customers, companies can be free to devote fully into achieving strategic goals.
In fact, the team could not have picked a better timing, as
71% business executives were reported to be introducing digital transformation initiatives over the next three years, all requiring the support of compliance. Webster states, “Vistra’s purpose is progress, but we are not the progress makers. What we do is remove obstacles that get in the way of our clients, thus empowering them to achieve business objectives and make progress in the world.”
With the exponential capabilities of AI, the possibilities of future innovation are truly endless - what had been cutting-edge technology six months ago could perhaps be out of date already. Therefore, Vistra’s vision for Geni extends beyond compliance, covering human resources, payroll, tax accounting and other verticals. Ultimately, the goal is for the AI assistant to grow as a comprehensive advisory platform, in efforts to bring forth unique, seamless and interconnected experiences with customers at the top of mind.
Closing the Gap with Industry Collaboration
To facilitate this mega transformation, AWS filled in the gaps as a strategic partner with industry experience and know-how, providing guidelines and best practices based on thousands of client use cases across the industry and around the globe. Gaining open access to AWS’ cloud infrastructure, product engineers, and solution architects, Vistra experimented with Claude 3.5 Sonnet and other high-performing models, eventually deciding to build the GEP on Amazon Bedrock.
Webster remarks, “AWS is not the only cloud service provider within the ecosystem, but it has a unique positioning differentiated by a practically agnostic approach. The team leans into the problem, providing us with insight and troubleshooting via weekly huddles and strategic workshops. For a CEO, they are like a security blanket, sturdy but always keeping pace and moving.”
Understanding the Business Imperative of Cybersecurity
Despite being a non-negotiable, compliance is also a non-differentiator: companies that comply do not gain a competitive advantage, yet failure to do so can result in severe legal and monetary repercussions. The financial services industry, possibly more than any other, needs to be vigilant with security and privacy when adopting transformative technology, especially since a data breach is estimated to cost an average of
US$3.3 million.
Therefore, cybersecurity is not just an issue for the IT team; it is a business imperative that should set the foundation for all decision-making. By implementing AWS’ robust guardrails to eliminate user-level and business-level risk, the GEP has been designed to fulfill ISO27001 standards and GDPR compliance, meaning client data will be used solely to improve internal AI performance and never shared externally.
Webster says, “Money is central to financial services: there is no commodity as closely attached to value. The one thing we had to make sure of was to keep regulations right at the heart of our design principles: not only is the cost of failure huge, but it would also put customers at a risk of significant loss. If we had not focused on these considerations from the outset of the project, then frankly, we were not doing our job, nor living up to our purpose.”
Building a Faster, Smarter and Safer Future
When it comes to the future of financial services, Webster believes speed, service quality and regulatory resilience will be top priorities. Transformative technology is expected to reduce time lags and paperwork, thereby improving response time and decision-making. In a fast-paced industry, time is money, which is no wonder why business leaders are betting big on AI.
Furthermore, AI is expected to enrich services, in a way that invents contextualised, high-quality experiences tailored to each customer’s business, industry, and location. With AI serving as a safety net to minimise risk and breakdowns in systems, compliance failures can hopefully be reduced to near zero. These trends align closely with Vistra’s vision for GEP and Geni, further demonstrating AI’s capabilities not only as an automation tool, but as a compelling aide for performing more complex tasks.
Redefining Compliance with the Power of Innovation
Vistra’s transformation journey marks a broader paradigm shift in the financial services sector - one that embraces innovation as a survival necessity, rather than a passing novelty. By combining AI-powered solutions with credible human expertise, Vistra has found new confidence in helping clients navigate the complexities of governance, risk and compliance.
Working together with AWS to bring forth the project into reality, Vistra now owns the flexibility, scale and security required to take lead in the AI-driven age. As digital transformation continues to unfold within the organisation and across all sectors, Vistra’s GEP and Geni are redefining the true value of a global partner, fostering a future-ready mindset to prepare for tomorrow’s challenges.
