Anver Yoffe has stepped down as Head of Regtech and Market Surveillance at eToro, moved to a new flat, acquired a dog and set about building an AI startup in an unglamorous corner of finance: regulatory compliance. “My goal is to create a holistic harmony of all different activities into one coherent, beautiful, advanced and easy-to-understand interface and solution,” Yoffe says.
Yoffe is something of an anomaly in his field: he insists that “regulation is cool” and sees himself as a “creative guy in this heavy, old-school area.”
During more than a decade spent on the regulatory front lines, including an earlier stint at Cappitech, a compliance reporting provider, Yoffe observed two recurring flaws in how financial firms approach the rulebook, both of which create ambiguity.
What a financial institution needs, Yoffe argues, is absolute operational certainty that it is entirely covered. "This is something I have never seen in the industry yet."
Knowing When Is Enough Is Enough
The first flaw is fragmentation. Compliance is treated as a collection of walled fiefs, with little coordination between departments.
A Chief Information Security Officer must grapple with the EU's DORA alongside commercial assurance frameworks like SOC 2. Meanwhile, a Chief Commercial Officer tracks cross-border tax reporting, and a Chief Compliance Officer tries to operationalise broader conduct rules across products.
Each department buys bespoke tools, drafts distinct policies, and speaks a different operational dialect. The result is a sprawling bureaucratic machine where nobody can be entirely certain that every flank is covered.
The second is an inability to recognise when enough is enough. Since they don't want to fall foul of supervisory authorities, firms continually pile on software, external advisers and manual checks, running up enormous costs without achieving greater certainty.
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Some of the trouble stems from how modern financial laws are drafted.
In the EU, frameworks such as MiFID II stretch across thousands of pages of dense legal text. Yet for all their bulk, these directives are littered with subjective demands. Firms are instructed to ensure arrangements are "adequate", fees are "appropriate", and transactions are executed in the "best interests" of clients. Regulators employ ambiguity by design, preserving discretion and preventing creative evasion.
One of the things he learned back at Capitech was “how much value I can bring to regulated entities by helping them to clarify this gray zone.”
Because for financial firms, ambiguity breeds costs.
Mapping the Compliance Labyrinth
Yoffe’s AI regtech startup, then, rests on a simple premise: a financial institution should need to satisfy an underlying regulatory duty only once, regardless of how many supervisory bodies demand it.
An AI interface will be connected to all business-relevant information and relevant regulations, laws and standards.
On top of the interface will sit a standard he is developing, "CLHEAR", an acronym for compliance, life cycle, harmonisation, explainability, assurance and reliability.
“This will be open source, by the way, because you constantly have new regulations and use cases," Yoffe explains.
The standard will be designed to ingest text from regulations, standards and laws and cross-reference them against commercial activities. “Then, consolidate five different regulations into the same obligation, like preventing insider trading," he goes on.
A duty to prevent market abuse and insider trading, for instance, exists in almost every developed market, even if the statutory language varies. By mapping these shared obligations directly to a firm's operational activities, legal entities and product profiles, the standard aims to eliminate redundant procedures.
The final building block is an AI operating system. Rather than forcing everyone in the company to navigate an archipelago of spreadsheets, manuals and ticketing software, a single conversational interface would link internal company data, upcoming licences and regulatory requirements.
An employee seeking to determine who bears statutory responsibility for an incident, or which test must be applied before launching a product, could query the system directly and initiate the relevant workflow.
“One of the most important things that needs to happen for CLHEAR to become the standard that I want it to become is to build a best-in-class advisory board," he says. “This is a call for people to participate,” he says.
A minimum viable product is scheduled for the end of 2026, which will include the AI interface based on the CLHEAR standard. Yoffe notes that conversational AI is a later goal.
Yoffe intends to target traditional commercial banks first. While notoriously slow to adopt early-stage software, established lenders carry an institutional credibility that lighter-touch fintechs cannot match.
Win over a risk committee at a tier-one bank, the thinking goes, and the broader market will follow.
Compliance a Prerequisite For Commercial Continuity
Yoffe is fond of sporting analogies. If fintech product development is akin to a free-scoring striker, compliance is the thankless task of the goalkeeper.
“Who said, though, that the goalkeeper cannot be the superstar?” he ponders.
After years of breakneck expansion, certain parts of the fintech sector appear to arrive at the same conclusion.
Indeed, one of the patterns Yoffe has observed in his decade-long career is the intuitive move to build and deploy products immediately to capture revenue. “But if you build very fast, you’ll get stuck and it's impossible to scale up like that. It’s like anything you build; a building with sticks might be beautiful, but the first storm will bring it down,” he stresses.
The shift in priorities is visible in executive recruitment across Europe. Both Kraken and Crypto.com have recently installed regulation specialists to helm their MiFID operations. Meanwhile, Revolut has onboarded a risk expert to run its Cyprus-based crypto unit.
In highly regulated environments, compliance is evolving from a back-office burden into a prerequisite for commercial continuity.
Venture capital has taken note. Within Y Combinator, startups applying AI to regulatory technology have become one of the fastest-growing categories between 2024 and 2026.
Congrats to @brettonai on their $75M Series B!
— Y Combinator (@ycombinator) February 10, 2026
Bretton AI builds AI agents that automate AML, KYC, and sanctions reviews for banks and fintechs. Their agents replace hours of manual compliance work with fast, fully auditable investigations that meet regulatory standards.… pic.twitter.com/t7hkVoJD07
It would appear that fintechs are discovering what traditional lenders learnt long ago: the speed at which a financial product can scale is governed entirely by the strength of the compliance architecture supporting it. Of course, what banks have also discovered is that compliance, as it stands, tends to clog the works.
This is where AI comes in, Yoffe believes, to change the rulebook, as it has the capability of providing a common language under a single interface.
Whether his venture can deliver on its sweeping promises remains to be seen. Many enterprise software providers have promised a unified solution, only to add another layer of complexity to an already bloated technology stack. And while supervisory authorities currently place the full weight of responsibility on financial institutions when deploying AI regtech tools, their stance may well shift as the underlying technology evolves.
“It’s a leap for me to jump in these deep waters. I'm not sure at all yet how it's going to evolve with early investment or bootstrapping,” Yoffe admits. Yet as regulatory obligations only ever multiply, the appetite for a common language will inevitably grow alongside it.
