Tech Archives

Innovation at a turning point: How tokenisation, AI and new investor expectations are reshaping Asset Management

Posted on January 26, 2026April 10, 2026 by Melanie Lopes

At Reseo, we know that not everyone has the time to listen to every podcast episode in full. That’s why, alongside each conversation in our State of the Art series, we publish a clear, concise written summary — capturing the most important ideas, themes and insights for readers across our industry.

In this edition, we distil the key messages from our conversation with John Allan, Head of Innovation and Operations at the Investment Association, about the forces redefining investment management today — from tokenisation and AI to fund modernisation, ESG data and the expectations of a new generation of investors.

Tokenisation Enters the Mainstream

Tokenisation has long been discussed as a theoretical possibility, but the past year marked a decisive shift toward real adoption. Several tokenised funds have now launched in the UK, demonstrating that distributed ledger technology (DLT) can serve as the shareholder register for investment funds — a development the Investment Association refers to as investment fund tokenisation.

This momentum will accelerate further as the UK prepares to issue its first digital gilt, lending legitimacy to tokenised assets within capital markets and strengthening the bridge between government issuance and the buy side.

AI: Incremental Gains Today, Transformational Potential Tomorrow

AI now touches nearly every part of the investment value chain. The gains currently visible are incremental — automating tasks, improving accuracy, speeding up processes — but the longer-term potential is far more significant. Firms recognise they must experiment proactively, even as they navigate varying regulatory approaches across the EU, US and UK. The UK’s principles-based stance creates uncertainty but also offers the freedom needed to innovate.

ESG and the Data Challenge

While enthusiasm for ESG remains strong, inconsistent measurement frameworks and data reliability issues continue to challenge the industry. With multiple methodologies and definitions competing in the market, firms still struggle to translate ESG information into decision-useful insights. More standardisation is needed before ESG data can fully support long-term investment strategies.

The Rise of the Digital Investor

A generational shift is also reshaping innovation priorities. Digital-native investors expect immediacy, transparency and intuitive digital experiences, often comparing the ease of buying crypto with the friction of investing in regulated funds. To respond, the Investment Association’s Investment Fund 3.0 initiative aims to modernise fund structures by improving liquidity, accelerating settlement, removing paper and making fund interactions more intuitive.

Where Firms Should Focus Next

As innovation accelerates — from quantum technologies to satellite-derived data — firms must be selective about where they invest their resources. Successful organisations will treat innovation as a strategic pillar rather than an optional add-on, embedding technology awareness across the entire board rather than relying on a single specialist. They will allocate meaningful budget to experimentation, accept that some initiatives will fail, and learn quickly from those that succeed. And they will increasingly look beyond their own walls, partnering with fintechs and external innovators to solve operational challenges faster and more efficiently. In a landscape where the pace of change is accelerating, firms that adopt this mindset will be best positioned to navigate what comes next.

Click here to listen to the full recording regarding this article.

Beyond AML: Innovation Drives Shaping the Future of Investment

Posted on January 13, 2026January 13, 2026 by Melanie Lopes

The festive season is behind us, and we hope the year has started well for you, spent with family and friends.

Over the past few episodes, we have explored a wide range of topics across financial crime, regulation, onboarding, and documentation trust. In our most recent episode, we focused on documentation trust and examined the growing role of AI — discussing both its opportunities and its limitations, and how these may shape the investment industry in the years ahead.

In this new episode, we are joined by John Allan, Head of Innovation and Operations at The Investment Association, and a leading voice in shaping how the UK investment industry adapts to emerging technologies and regulatory change.

John is in conversation with Pierre-Yves Rahari, Co-Founder of Reseo, for a deep-dive into innovation in the investment management industry. Together, they explore the major forces currently reshaping the sector — from tokenisation and AI to operational resistance, fund modernisation, and the accelerating pace of change.

The discussion looks beyond theory to address how firms can navigate these shifts in practice, and what it really takes to apply innovation in real time.

Guest
• John Allan, Head of Innovation & Operations, The Investment Association

Host
• Pierre-Yves Rahari, Co-Founder, Reseo

Producer & Editor
• Melanie Lopes, Sales & Marketing Associate, Reseo

Thanks for listening to the Reseo State of the Art podcast – you can find us here and on Spotify.

Looking forward to 2026

Posted on January 8, 2026 by Melanie Lopes

As we welcome a new year, we reflect on what to wish for in 2026.

Looking at the values that underpin Reseo’s business, we believe that our innovative digital identity wallet for businesses goes to the heart of protecting the financial system that underpins our economies — and ultimately our wellbeing and societies. As such, we contribute — modestly yet meaningfully — to the societal expectations of trust, sustainability, transparency and security.

Today, in the face of global events that unsettle the world and send ripple effects far beyond their epicentres, we ask ourselves: How do we reconcile Reseo’s innovative and societal values with the feeling that geopolitical conditions continue to deteriorate?

In 2026, we will choose to keep daring: Daring to aim for better, to create new opportunities for collaboration, to support one another — and to look to the future with both clarity and confidence, fully aware of the risks that surround us. We will also continue to strengthen our contribution to the financial community and its wider ecosystem by advancing digital trust, enabling more secure and efficient interactions, and supporting a more resilient and reliable financial infrastructure.

Because that, too, is what innovation requires.

We wish you a very happy, joyful and healthy 2026,

The Reseo Team

When Documents Can No Longer Be Trusted: Rebuilding AML/KYC in the Age of AI

Posted on December 10, 2025 by Melanie Lopes

In the latest episode of State of the Art, Reseo Co-Founders Pierre-Yves Rahari and Luuk Jacobs examine a challenge that is reshaping the foundations of financial crime prevention: the accelerating breakdown of trust in documents.

Across the investment industry, AML and KYC processes still rely heavily on documentation such as passports, certificates, corporate filings and identification records. Yet artificial intelligence is now making it possible to fabricate these documents with astonishing realism and at scale. As the lines between real and fake blur, the industry faces a fundamental question: what happens when the documents we have always relied on can no longer be trusted?

The Emerging Breakdown of Document Trust

AI now makes it possible to fabricate convincing corporate records, beneficial ownership structures, historic filings and identity documents, all with the appearance of legitimacy. What once required expertise and time is now achievable with readily available tools. The majority of companies remain genuine, but the small percentage of sophisticated falsifications represents a systemic vulnerability.

The implication is profound: Traditional document-driven verification no longer provides the assurance it once did. Email exchanges, PDFs and notarised copies aren’t inherently reliable when the underlying content can be artificially generated or manipulated at scale.

Why the Old Model No Longer Works

The challenge is not simply the documents themselves, but the process behind them. Most AML/KYC workflows remain dependent on information submitted by the investor, creating a single point of failure. Manual reviews are done; however, it is harder to distinguish between genuine documentation and high-quality AI-generated forgeries.

This makes a structural shift unavoidable. Verification must increasingly rely on independently sourced, authoritative data rather than investor-supplied documents. Corporate registries, supervisory bodies and tax authorities offer information tied to regulatory oversight and embedded governance, which provides more durable assurance than documents alone. While no single source is perfect, combining multiple trusted datasets makes falsification significantly harder to sustain.

AI as Part of the Solution

Although AI is a driver of the threat, it is also essential to the defence. Used responsibly, AI can compare information across jurisdictions, flag inconsistencies, detect anomalies in company structures and maintain continuously updated profiles of clients. This opens the door to perpetual compliance, a dynamic model that replaces the current cycle of onboarding followed by years-long gaps before the next review.

Corporate structures and ownership can change dramatically in months. AI-enabled monitoring of independently sourced data means AML/KYC no longer has to lag behind real-world developments.

The Case for Interoperability and Collective Defence

A further weakness in today’s environment is fragmentation. Administrators, transfer agents and asset managers each conduct their own AML/KYC checks, often without visibility into decisions made elsewhere. Fraudsters exploit these gaps.

The industry needs a more interconnected ecosystem, where systems are interoperable and trusted data can be exchanged securely, and through consent, remain GDPR compliant. This does not mean a single shared utility, but rather a collaborative architecture that allows risk signals and verified information to flow between platforms, reducing duplication and strengthening the collective defence against financial crime.

Learning From Other Sectors

Similar challenges have already been addressed in other industries, offering inspiration for financial services. In healthcare, AI models compare scans against thousands of other images to identify abnormalities. A technique that could be used to compare companies across peer groups to detect unusual patterns in structure or behaviour. In agriculture and food supply chains, tokenisation is used to trace products from origin to supermarket, creating tamper-resistant provenance records. The same principles could underpin future approaches to tracking corporate identity and document provenance in financial crime prevention, including their incorporation into blockchain-based systems.

These analogies highlight a broader truth: the technologies needed to rebuild trust already exist. The challenge lies in adapting them to an AML/KYC context.

What Firms Should Do Now

The evolving threat landscape requires boards and executive teams to take a more active stance. Protecting the firm from fraud, money laundering and regulatory exposure is not simply a matter of enhancing checklists. It demands a change in mindset and architecture.

Four priorities emerge clearly:

Shift from document-driven to data-driven verification using independently sourced, authoritative information.
Move toward perpetual compliance, replacing episodic reviews with continuous monitoring of client profiles.
Digitise and simplify AML/KYC processes to reduce friction while strengthening defences.
Collaborate across the ecosystem, developing a collective defence that prevents bad actors from exploiting gaps between firms.

The collapse of document trust is not an isolated threat; it is a systemic one. The firms that respond early with a modern data foundation, smarter technology and collaborative architectures will be best positioned to maintain trust in a world where fraud is increasingly automated.

Click here to listen to the full recording regarding this article.

New episode: Regulation Ramp-Up — The Coming AMLA Regulation and Its Impact on the EU and UK

Posted on October 21, 2025December 11, 2025 by Melanie Lopes

Welcome back to a new season of Reseo’s State of Art podcast — where we speak with industry experts about the ideas and forces shaping the future of investment management.

In this episode, Pierre-Yves Rahari, Co-Founder and Director at Reseo, is joined by Giles Swan, a Public Policy and Regulatory Consultant.

Together, they discuss how the upcoming Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) regulation — set to take effect in July 2027 — will reshape the regulatory landscape, and what it means for firms, clients, and compliance practices. They also reflect on the evolving relationship between regulation, technology, and financial crime prevention, and how the industry can act now to prepare for what’s ahead.

Guest:Giles Swan — Public Policy Consultant, Swan FS
Host:Pierre-Yves Rahari— Co-Founder and Director, Reseo
Produced by: Melanie Lopes — Sales & Marketing Associate, Reseo

Thanks for listening to the Reseo State of the Art podcast – you can find us here and on Spotify.

Digitalisation is the new era: Are industries keeping up to transform corporate client onboarding?

Posted on July 30, 2025August 5, 2025 by Melanie Lopes

In a world where digital touchpoints define the client journey, onboarding remains the first true test of innovation.

Opening a personal account with a neo bank has been revolutionised with the smartphone and all we need is our passport, proof of address and the camera on our phone. Based on this input, various checks are carried out in the background and 10 minutes later you can start using your account and a digital bank card.

How different this is for corporate onboarding; papers are sent via email, post and sometimes still even fax, endless requests for clarification leading it to take on average 4-5 weeks before the ok is given. It is a far cry from the retail sector account opening.

Equally, technologies like AI are undermining the traditional ways of manual checking documentation and fake data such as a complete set of fake company structures and documentation can be created in no time undermining the trust in documents [1].

Change is nevertheless on its way due to technological advancements e.g. AI, cloud computing, API’s, detection and zero trust document technology, OCR (Optical Character Recognition and LLM (Large Language Models).

Regulators also pinch in and are pushing for change and moving towards perpetual compliance. The enhanced EU AMLR regulation – aiming to harmonize compliance obligations for banks, crypto-asset service providers, real estate agents, legal professionals, and other obliged entities, Regulation 2024/1624 [2] – is just around the corner with implementation by July 2027. Whereas the EU Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA, the first centralised EU authority for direct EU wide supervision of AML/CFT compliance) has just set up a shop in Frankfurt.

Market expectations are shifting, and the need for speed to benefit from market opportunities in investment management, industry trading and corporate banking, to name a few, should not be upheld by paper based processes.

Last but not least, the consistent increase in the cost of AML/CFT compliance can only be mitigated if we address the current outdated way of working.

To move away from the manual checks of documents, we need to shift to a technology driven verification of corporate data and information (not stale documents), to create real-time insights in corporate structures, activities, decision makers and (ultimate) beneficiaries.

The road to change is mired with obstacles of legacy infrastructure, risk averse organisations, current over engineered processes (to be replaced instead of replicated), interoperability of systems and platforms while remaining within the boundaries of legislation like GDPR.

At Reseo, we understand these challenges and we believe that digital onboarding is not just a process but a client experience differentiator whereby the Reseo modular, technology driven, secure and client centric e-ID is a digital wallet that can be shared with any counterparty on the platform. To transform corporate client onboarding, we blend technology and investor-centric services, ensuring continued financial trust while future-proofing the industries for the digital generation. AML/KYC is just our starting point.

[1] Xavier Hamori, KYC in 2025: The Collapse of Document Trust, June 1, 2025

[2] Europa.eu. (2024). Regulation – EU – 2024/1624 – EN – EUR-Lex. [online] Available at: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1624/oj/eng.

Tech: Employees growth and adaptability in the workplace

Posted on May 20, 2025September 10, 2025 by Melanie Lopes

In today’s era, technology is an essential part of everyone’s daily life. Especially since COVID-19 came by and introduced hybrid and remote working. Many employees have the opportunity to grow in companies because they have personalised goals and targets that they want to achieve. Companies have required resources that can be beneficial, which are mainly online. However, many employees have the initiative to grow outside by using online learning free platforms, amongst other things, that are available for them.

It is important that everyone adapts to the new trends in tech, as there are many new innovative technologies coming out. For example, AI and ChatGPT have benefits to help staff grow and expand their learning abilities, even though there might be some controversial aspects.

Many people fear that tech such as AI is taking over people’s jobs. A study carried out by the CNBC SurveyMonkey Workforce survey shows that 60% of people who use AI daily are scared of how much this could impact them by losing their jobs. With approximately 300 million jobs that could be affected globally, because of the vast growth of new innovative technology in the markets (Kelly, 2024).[i] However, technology can be very beneficial; let’s explore how.

Upscaling learning skills and well-being:

The development and growth of employees play a great part in the involvement of technology. With all the different online platforms, employees have a great advantage in learning more than expected. Webinars, courses, modules, free e-learning, ebooks and many more are resources available for employees to obtain and adapt in the workplace.

Whilst an employee achieves their goals, it is also important that they monitor their well-being. This is another area where technology can help employees while prospering. This is based on their productivity and innovation, especially while working on big projects, to adapt their work and well-being efficiently, where special platforms help them balance stress and work.

Communication and collaboration:

In today’s workplace, we have a greater frequency of working remotely and a hybrid environment by using Teams, Zoom and other communication platforms, allowing it to be easier to communicate all over the world. For example, Reseo, where everyone is located in other locations. Through emails, meetings, staff have the opportunity to strengthen their relationships with their teams by allowing flexible hours for both parties, which can potentially foster collaboration.

Whilst this happens, a lot of knowledge and experience is shared amongst everyone, making it easier to adapt to different environments when working on projects. Microsoft 365 allows the workflow among employees to be easier, faster and more efficient, allowing staff to adapt to new ways of working.

Automatic processes and making decisions:

At Reseo, this is one of the areas that is most used at work. With workflows like CRMS systems, it is easier to monitor, record and analyse data. They can detect data that we might need. Where it’s more detailed and automated, to create other materials such as reports or charts from the data detected and imputed. Making it easier for staff to make decisions smartly and faster due to the help that these systems provide

Overall, technology and digitalisation are important for the daily use of employees to understand, learn, monitor and enable when working.

[i] Kelly, J. (2024a). Workers Who Use Artificial Intelligence Are More Likely To Fear That AI May Replace Them. [online] Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/01/08/workers-who-use-artificial-intelligence-are-more-likely-to-fear-that-ai-may-replace-them/.

Reseo

Tag: Tech