4CRisk Enables Efficient, AI-driven Regulatory Change and Compliance Management

Managing regulatory, compliance, and risk processes is a resource-intensive practice. Collecting and analyzing information from thousands of sources – and then taking the correct actions in a specific business environment – has traditionally required a great deal of manual effort.

The founders of 4CRisk saw an opportunity to take this burden off organizations by harnessing two powerful efficiency-drivers: AI and low-code development.

Founded in 2020, they had to bring their idea to market quickly to outpace their competition, and decided on Mendix to develop a scalable and secure customer-facing front-end that would seamlessly integrate with their proprietary AI models.

As a result, their team has been able to accelerate development cycles and bring new features to market at a rate that is 2-3x faster than what would be possible with traditional programming.

Enterprise Reliability at Startup Speed

“Risk and compliance management happens at the intersection of constantly evolving regulatory, business, and external risk environments,” said Venky Yerrapotu, 4CRisk’s Co-Founder and CEO.

“The input for these processes typically comes in the form of unstructured content – laws, regulations, standards, policies – so it takes a lot of human capital to process this content and the risks. We wanted to harness language models that are specialized for this domain,” he said.

Yerrapotu has over 20 years of experience in the domain. When he and Surpadeep Appikonda co-founded 4CRisk, they saw two important keys to the organization’s success:

Purpose-built AI models, trained specifically for regulatory, compliance, and risk.
Software that could evolve as quickly as their customer’s needs.

4CRisk’s engineering team has built their specialized models – consisting of Specialized Language Models (SLMs) based on 3 billion parameters – from the ground up, fine-tuning them for use in the regulatory, compliance, and risk space.

In building products to meet the growing market need, Yerrapotu and the team recognized that a SaaS product developed with traditional programming could put a strain on their technical resources who were already managing a large and complex proprietary AI model.

4CRisk realized that a low-code development platform could offer the competitive edge, and at the same time support evolving requirements in the rapidly changing world of AI solutions. They began evaluating a host of market leaders and ultimately selected Mendix over other low-code platforms, like OutSystems, due to its:

Agility and ease of use, which would allow 4CRisk to be responsive to customer needs as their business evolved.
Broad range of UI capabilities, where the team could expand their device operability and data visualization over time.
Flexible deployment options, where 4CRisk could deploy to the Mendix public cloud but also on their customer’s private cloud environments.
Security capabilities, both in a multi-tenant capacity and how 4CRisk can segregate their customer data.

“We were always looking for something that was scalable and customizable because we knew at some point, we would reach a stage where customizing new views would be important for us,” said Shwetha Shantharam, Head of Product at 4CRisk.

Development Efficiency Fuels Process Efficiency

4CRisk’s goal was to deliver products that meet the highest levels of security, are easy to use, and maintain high performance – even while processing tremendous volumes of data.

Since 2021 their team launched four core products:

Regulatory Research, which aggregates information from thousands of sources, ranging from federal and state regulations to InfoSec standards. The tool then filters this through the lens of the customer organization’s obligations as part of standard bodies such as ISO or GDPR, identifying areas that overlap and producing rulebooks specific to the needs and operations of different departments.
Regulatory Change Management, which identifies upcoming changes in the regulatory landscape and alerts customers on the impact to their contracts, policies, and procedures.
Compliance Mapping, which brings together regulatory research and in-house policies, documentation, controls, and procedures. Compliance mapping also contains filters and views so that specific teams can easily understand the gaps and actions that are relevant for their teams.
Ask ARIA Co-Pilot, which instantly answers compliance questions, transforming policies and procedures into an easily searchable knowledge base. Users can gain valuable insights, save up to 90% of research time, and boost the efficacy of the responses.

These products can accelerate regulatory, compliance, and risk processes by anywhere from 5 to 50 times faster than a human alone. Furthermore, the speed at which they were brought to market ranged from a just a few weeks to a few months with Mendix.

“Our models are specialized, and we fine-tune our SLMs because we know that our solutions are purpose-built for certain use cases,” said Shantharam. “There are other competitors out there who can bring in the same amount of data that we do, but what we do with that data is very different.”

Speed is also paramount in terms of processing this data and system responsiveness.

“Our dashboards consist of consolidated data from over 400,000 records, and this is dynamic data that is being updated regularly. Then, at the click of a button, we analyze all that data and present it in a beautiful dashboard within seconds, which we feel is a breakthrough,” said Nerella.

Within the industries that 4CRisk serves, security and data privacy is a critical capability. On top of the built-in security that is native to Mendix, 4CRisk has kept the data segregated between their AI engine and Mendix to ensure the utmost security for their customers.

“Our AI models are trained on external data, and we have kept it in such a way that data security is not breached anywhere. No customer data goes beyond the Mendix layer,” said Nerella.

Personalized Customer Experience

Leveraging Mendix’s front-end capabilities, 4CRisk has been able to create modern, enterprise-grade user experiences for their customers in a fraction of the time that traditional development would have taken.

“There are a few key innovations we were able to achieve with Mendix,” said Yerrapotu.

“One is the ability to showcase unstructured text in a more structured fashion, and with tagging to showcase AI-generated intelligence to users in a very easy-to-use format… Another is the ability to integrate analytics like Sankey diagrams. So, it’s not just text, but it’s visually appealing and interactive, and we were able to do this at a much faster pace with Mendix,” he said.

Outside of their specialized products, 4CRisk recently expanded their product portfolio with a more general-purpose always-on advisor – the Ask ARIA Co-Pilot – which has been rolled out to over 10,000 customer users.

“It’s a typical Co-pilot that can be used by anyone in your organization. When there are thousands of regulations to be followed, you can enter a query and it will give you answers. So that is one enhancement we’ve offered to improve our customers’ day-to-day activities,” said Nerella.

Accelerating Regulatory, Compliance, and Risk Management

Having a low-code platform has empowered 4CRisk to make strides within their industry at a rapid pace. “To put it in perspective compared to our day-to-day activities in React or JavaScript – we are developing at a speed that is 2-3x faster with Mendix,” said Nerella.

Yerrapotu shared that in some instances, the engineering team has been able to turn around updates in less than 24 hours to showcase the agility of the platform to prospective customers.

The team is already exploring new iterations of their product suite to offer the most modern customer experience. 4CRisk sees Mendix as a key enabler as they explore user experience enhancements such as voice interaction, data visualization, and agentic AI.

It’s nearly impossible to escape the buzziness of AI in every industry. Similar to low-code development, Shantharam stresses the importance of setting the right expectations at the onset of your AI journey.

“AI is not a magic bullet to solve everything,” she said. “It’s not going to solve everything for you – it’s going to augment you to do your work more effectively and efficiently. When you decide to bring in an AI system combined with low-code, try to start small and have patience with the AI, because it will get better the more you use it.

“You can’t afford to not use AI, so start the journey, and be patient as you go,” she concluded.