Trained in information engineering, Andrea Tesei has long evolved at the crossroads of technology, complexity and decision-making. This trajectory led him to take an interest in an often underestimated angle: not the rule as such, but the way it is understood, structured and defended within organizations.
Now CEO and co-founder ofAptus.AI, a European RegTech solution dedicated to financial institutions, he supports compliance and legal teams in building consistent, audit-ready regulatory intelligence. In this interview, he shares his vision of compliance as a genuine lever for governance and performance.
In a context where rules are evolving as fast as markets, is the real threat regulatory overload... or the inability to extract useful intelligence?
Overload is not the core of the problem. The real risk arises in the interval between the publication of a text and its translation into precise, documented, decision-making impacts. It's in this space that validations become fragmented, uncertainty sets in and governance slows down. It is at this point that the organization must move from a rule interpreted differently by each function to a single, coherent and defensible reading, shared between compliance, risk and operations.
In Luxembourg, where precision, traceability and alignment between the three lines of defense are decisive, the ability to transform regulations into immediately exploitable intelligence becomes a strategic advantage. Legible, contextualized and audit-ready rules not only speed up decisions, but also reinforce their coherence and solidity.
Luxembourg is home to a large number of funds, private banks and insurers. What regulatory weaknesses are you seeing?
Luxembourg stands out for its much more stringent demonstration requirements than other markets. The aim is not just to comply with the rule, but to show how it has been interpreted, and how it aligns with delegations, risks and controls.
This requirement generates two structuring needs: a directly actionable reading, not a raw watch; and a coherent reading between the three lines of defense, essential to reduce internal friction and secure arbitrations.
In a cross-border environment where every decision must be argued, justified and traceable, Luxembourg institutions are looking for solutions that reduce the amount of dispersed interpretation and increase the quality of governance.
Many managers still see compliance as a "cost". How do you change this perception?
This perception changes as soon as compliance begins to accelerate decisions rather than slow them down.
As long as teams have to manually analyze texts, compare versions and reconstruct an impact logic, compliance is experienced as a cost center. But when regulations become instantly readable, contextualized, automatically aligned with internal policies and demonstrably documented for CSSF audits, then compliance becomes a lever for organizational efficiency.
The transformation is profound: teams move from a reactive role to a proactive posture, where regulatory management becomes a driver of internal innovation, capable of streamlining validations, reinforcing confidence and accelerating strategic arbitrations.
With DORA, AIFMD II, ESG and the acceleration of transparency requirements, what skills will become decisive?
The key skill is becoming a hybrid one: linking texts, risks, operations and data. Understanding the rules is one thing; transforming them immediately into concrete impacts and coherent decisions is quite another. AI is not intended to decide for teams, but to structure, compare and make explicit obligations to support better-informed human decisions.
For this, institutions need two pillars. Firstly, enhanced human skills: the ability to interpret, prioritize and link obligations to internal processes. On the other, a suitable technological foundation: automatic version comparison, obligation modeling, alignment with internal policies, and the traceability required by CSSF audits.
Organizations that successfully adopt AI are also those that develop internal champions, a culture of controlled experimentation, strengthened collaboration between functions, and tools chosen to integrate naturally with their governance. These factors, more than the technology itself, determine the ability to extract a real ROI.
You often speak of an "AI-friendly regulation" of the future. What would it take to make compliance more fluid and efficient in the future?
Smooth compliance depends on regulations that are structured to be understood quickly and applied without constant reinterpretation. This implies better clarification of intentions, stable granularity and clear versioning.
Luxembourg, thanks to its proximity to the players and the rigor of its regulator, is particularly well positioned to encourage this model. Regulations designed to be intelligible - both by human teams and by augmented systems - enable more consistent, faster and safer application.
It reduces uncertainty, improves the quality of controls and reinforces market stability. This is the natural direction for a financial center that favors solid governance and effective decision-making.
What made you see regulation not as a constraint, but as a driver of transformation?
It was when I realized that it's never the rule that holds an organization back, but the uncertainty surrounding its interpretation. When impacts become clear, structured and traceable, teams move forward faster, with greater confidence and greater coherence.
Regulation then becomes a framework that secures action, not a brake on it.
This conviction guides our vision at Aptus.AI: to transform regulatory complexity into operational clarity, at the service of the speed and quality of decision-making. And the Luxembourg market, demanding in terms of governance, auditability and cross-functional alignment, confirms the relevance of this approach every day.
This article has been automatically translated using Breeze, powered by DeepL.