CUBE’s Acin saves banks millions in non-financial risk management using Azure AI

The global regulatory landscape is increasingly complex. Today’s financial institutions must navigate an intricate web of international regulations, shaped by shifting economic forces, accelerating technologies and rising geopolitical uncertainty. Organisations are under increased pressure to demonstrate compliance but face challenges such as control standardisation, incurring time and cost inefficiencies.

“Managing non-financial risk has historically been a very manual, siloed and subjective process for financial institutions,” says Kate Joicey-Cecil, President at Acin. “We bring a different approach, using AI to solve these challenges and drive excellence at speed and at scale.”

Acin, acquired by leading global RegTech CUBE in June 2025, was founded with a bold vision: to transform how financial organisations manage and report non-financial risk. Its AI-driven platform streamlines risk reporting, aggregating data from multiple sources into a single, unified view of risk and controls. This enables organisations to accelerate their path to maturity, cutting through complexity and costs, whilst meeting regulatory obligations with confidence.

“AI elevates our proposition, helping us to accelerate our capabilities,” says Kate Joicey-Cecil. “This, combined with our SME expertise and industry footprint, is what sets us apart, enabling us to significantly reduce compliance costs and improve risk management for some of the world’s largest financial institutions.”

Addressing challenges with agentic AI

In risk management, a control is a documented process designed to reduce the likelihood or impact of a potential risk. When multiple controls have been written by different contributors over the years, standardisation issues will inevitably emerge, such as variations in format, duplications or language that doesn’t align with industry standards.

“When you're looking at operational risk, it’s all in a world of language and text, from the regulations themselves to how you write a process, procedure or policy,” explains Sam White, Head of Customer Analytics at CUBE. “How people test these controls is very subjective, because it entirely depends on the individual’s background, knowledge and skill set – and this can lead to inconsistencies.”

Given the text-heavy nature of these controls, CUBE’s Acin recognised the potential of LLMs to revolutionise their management. It seized on the opportunity to develop an agentic Rewrite Tool that rapidly optimises and standardises non-financial risk controls. By enhancing clarity, consistency and quality, the platform empowers financial organisations to stay ahead of regulatory change, faster and smarter than ever before.

“We’ve identified risk reporting issues in the financial sector that we can solve with AI. These problems are very task-based, which lends itself to agentic thinking,” says Graeme Wynn, Executive Head, Data and AI Engineering at CUBE. “Our tool combines AI with subject matter expertise. Firstly, we work on a pilot for the client. Once they’ve agreed the end design prompt and we've engineered that into our agent, we can start rewriting their controls, saving vast amounts of time and effort.”

Trusted by industry, strengthened by innovation

Embarking on this path to innovation demanded not only cutting-edge technologies but also trust. Operating within the financial industry, CUBE’s Acin sought a partner with a deep understanding of the regulatory landscape and a strong foundation of secure, trusted infrastructure. That partner was Microsoft.

“We wanted a partner that would allow us to work in a trusted fashion with banks. Microsoft was our preferred choice from the outset, bringing that implicit trust that Microsoft delivers around security and data privacy,” says Graeme Wynn.

By partnering with Microsoft, CUBE’s Acin can easily and rapidly leverage the latest Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic capabilities – another important reason why Acin chose Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models and Foundry Tools. The collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI was of particular importance to Acin, enabling the company to push the boundaries of innovation on a secure platform, whilst delivering trust and peace of mind for its clients.

Graeme Wynn emphasises, “The way Microsoft has embedded OpenAI into its trusted infrastructure allowed us to start thinking about using AI with banks. It enabled us to leverage that secure, underlying data storage and almost immediately start building and deploying AI for the financial industry.”

Driving results for leading financial institutions

“It usually takes three hours for a human to review and rewrite one control. Our tool cuts that time to 20 minutes and has incredibly high acceptance rates of over 95 percent,” enthuses Graeme Wynn.

Through its Rewrite Tool, CUBE’s Acin is transforming non-financial risk for major financial institutions, boosting accuracy and quality, whilst slashing control review times from hours to minutes. A tier one bank used the tool to rewrite over 20,000 controls in just one week. This work is the equivalent of saving 7,500 days of human effort. 

Manually rewriting this volume of controls would take years and hinder an organisation’s ability to meet its regulatory obligations. In addition, the bank expects to achieve annual savings of up to £5.2 million by using CUBE’s Acin to identify and eliminate redundant controls.

There have been multiple success stories that demonstrate the capabilities of the partnership with Microsoft, matching ambition with cutting-edge technologies to help major financial organisations strengthen their risk posture in a rapid, accurate and cost-effective way.

Building at fintech speed, on next-gen tools

“It was such a perfect decision for Microsoft to invest heavily in AI,” says Sam White. “Having access to AI from a trusted partner enabled us to build at scale, with relevant new models being released all the time. It’s allowed us to build quickly, at fintech speed.”

Graeme Wynn says, “We deliberately adopted a collection of components in Azure AI that allow us to store large volumes of complex financial information – structured, unstructured and graph data – enabling us to work with it efficiently and drive value for our clients.”

Redefining the future of operational risk

CUBE announced its partnership with Microsoft in September 2025, redefining RegTech built on trusted Microsoft AI. What began with transforming the future of operational risk through Acin, now extends to redefining the future of both compliance and risk.

In the digital age, compliance and risk are no longer cost centres; they are sources of resilience, reputation and readiness. Through its partnership with Microsoft, CUBE is realising this vision. 

“Our partnership with Microsoft allows us to solve client problems rapidly, with confidence. We can also prove we’re built on a trusted, well-architected foundation, allowing us to build credibility with major financial institutions,” says James Mackonochie, Executive Head of Platform at CUBE. 

He continues: “We've got a mantra internally, which is to fall in love with the problem before you even think about the solution. Knowing that we've got the infrastructure and power of Microsoft behind us when we're solving those problems makes our lives so much easier.”

Discover more about CUBE on LinkedIn.