Solutions · Compass
Regulatory answers you can check
Compass answers questions about financial, crypto and AI regulation using the actual text of the law — and shows you the exact provision behind every sentence.
Where this fits. Compass answers your question today; Horizon tells you when the answer changes. When a question turns into a project, the practice picks it up: EU AI Act Readiness and AI Governance & Documentation for the AI rulebook, Digital Asset Licensing for crypto-asset questions.
The most dangerous answer is the one that looks right
Anyone working in regulated finance, crypto or AI knows the bind. The law is enormous and fragmented — an apparently simple question (“does this token offering need a prospectus?”, “what must we disclose, and when?”) rarely sits in one act, and answering it properly means reading across several instruments written years apart that cross-refer to each other constantly. The law also moves: amended, consolidated, phased in over years. Text that was correct last year may not be correct now, and text that exists today may not apply until 2027. Working from a saved PDF, a summary, or memory is how firms end up confidently wrong.
So people reach for AI — and discover the specific way general-purpose assistants fail here. They produce fluent, plausible answers with citations that look authoritative and are sometimes invented, misattributed, or drawn from a version of the law no longer in force.
The failure is not that the wrong answer looks wrong. It’s that a wrong answer looks exactly like a right one.
The result is a familiar economics problem: broad regulatory questions are expensive to answer properly, so they either consume senior time or get answered on instinct. Compass exists to break that trade-off.
How it works, in three ideas
You ask in plain language, the way you’d ask a colleague. Compass searches the legislation itself and drafts its answer from that text — not from general knowledge, not from what a model absorbed in training. If the text doesn’t answer your question, it tells you so.
A quoted passage must appear, word for word, in the provision it’s attributed to. Anything that fails that check is removed rather than shown. This is a mechanical check applied to every answer — not a matter of the system’s judgement on a good day.
The citation beside each answer is assembled from the underlying legal database, not composed by the model. That closes off the most common failure of AI legal tools: a confidently written reference to a provision that doesn’t exist, or doesn’t say what’s claimed.
What an answer looks like
Illustrative answer
Q: Do we have to tell people they are dealing with an automated system?
Where a system is designed to interact directly with people, the operator must build it so that those people are told they are interacting with an automated system, unless that is obvious from the circumstances 1. The information has to be given no later than the first interaction 2. A separate marking duty for automated outputs applies only from a later date 3.
Related provisions, drawn from the cross-references in the law itself: Article 12(2) to (3), on marking and labelling.
PROVISION [1] · OPEN BESIDE THE ANSWER
Article 12(1)
“Operators shall ensure that systems intended to interact directly with natural persons are designed and developed in such a way that the natural persons concerned are informed that they are interacting with an automated system, unless this is obvious from the point of view of a natural person who is reasonably well informed, observant and circumspect, taking into account the circumstances and the context of use…”
Quoted words highlighted where they appear in the official text. Read the full provision, then the related provisions the law itself cross-refers to.
Illustrative. The question, the wording and the references are composed for this page to show how an answer is put together. No instrument, product or provider is named, and nothing here is a statement of what Compass holds or of what the law requires.
Every Compass answer arrives built to be checked in the time it takes to read it:
- 01The answer itself, in plain professional language, with numbered markers showing which provision supports which statement.
- 02The provisions relied on, each openable in full beside the answer, so you read the official wording yourself.
- 03The exact quoted words, highlighted inside the provision — you see precisely what the answer rests on.
- 04A flag where a cited provision is not yet in force, so you’re never shown a rule that applies from a future date without being told.
- 05Related provisions, drawn from the cross-references in the law itself, as a starting point for going deeper.
The intent is simple: you should never have to take Compass’s word for anything.
What it covers
Compass works over the consolidated text of the European Union’s financial-services, crypto-asset, digital and artificial-intelligence rulebook: the core regulations and directives governing markets, payments, banking, insurance, funds, market conduct, financial-crime prevention, operational and digital resilience, data, online platforms, and artificial intelligence.
The corpus is maintained against the official source and refreshed as the law changes, and the system answers on the law as it currently applies — not on superseded or not-yet-applicable text. The full, current contents are visible inside the product itself.
Who it’s for
You need a defensible first answer today, and you can’t rely on it until you’ve seen the underlying provision. Compass gives you the answer and the provisions in one screen.
You face serious exposure without a large legal function. Before you commit engineering time, you need to know which rules bite — and reading the rulebook yourself was never realistic.
Your product predates the obligations now attaching to it. You need to understand duties that didn’t exist when the system was designed, in language an engineer can act on, with the source one click away.
Locating the provisions, establishing what the text says, assembling the citations. Compass compresses those hours into a cited draft, so the billable time starts where the judgement starts.
The common thread: people who must be able to check the answer, not merely receive one.
What Compass is not
We put this on the page, not in the small print, because it’s what makes the rest credible.
Compass is a research and screening tool. It doesn’t know your facts, your contracts, your regulator’s supervisory practice, or your risk appetite. It produces a grounded starting point — not a conclusion you can act on unadvised.
It makes the work that reaches a lawyer better prepared: the right provisions identified, the obvious ground covered, the questions sharpened. Where a matter genuinely needs judgement, Compass is the preparation, not the answer.
Where the law is genuinely unclear, where the question turns on facts not supplied, or where the point sits outside the legislation it holds — it says so.
It tells you what the enacted text says. Supervisory expectation, enforcement priorities and market practice sit outside it, with the people who handle them (see below).
Where humans come in
Licentium is a regulatory practice as well as a product company, and Compass is built to sit alongside the advisory work, not to imitate it.
Compass handles the part of regulatory work that is systematic: finding the provisions, establishing what the text says, and making that checkable. Our advisers handle the part that requires judgement: applying the text to your specific business, weighing risk, dealing with regulators, and taking a position you can act on.
The tool does the reading
Finding the provisions, establishing what the text says, and making that checkable.
The practice does the judging
Applying the text to your specific business, weighing risk, dealing with regulators, and taking a position you can act on.
In practice that means Compass shortens the distance to a well-formed question — and the practice answers the questions that genuinely need a person. The tool does the reading; the practice does the judging. When a Compass session surfaces something that needs judgement, the advisers who maintain the corpus are one message away.
Frequently asked questions
A general assistant answers from what it learned in training and can produce citations that look right but are not. Compass answers only from the legislation it holds, checks every quotation against the official text before showing it, builds references from the legal record rather than letting the AI write them, and declines when the law doesn’t support an answer.
You check it — and the product is built to make that quick. Every statement points to a provision, every provision opens in full, and the quoted words are highlighted where they appear in the official text.
Compass works from consolidated legislation maintained against the official source and refreshed as it changes. It answers on the law as it applies now, and flags any cited provision that only takes effect at a future date.
It says so. Compass is designed to decline rather than produce an unsupported answer — a clear “the legislation doesn’t cover this” instead of an elegant guess.
As a research and screening tool, yes — that’s what it’s for. As legal advice, no. It’s built to prepare and inform a decision, not to make one. When you need the decision made, that’s the advisory practice.
The current focus is the EU rulebook. The approach isn’t EU-specific, and coverage develops over time — the live scope is always visible in the product.
Ask it something you actually need to know
Put a real question to Compass — the one sitting in your backlog because answering it properly felt expensive. Read the answer. Then open the provisions and check it. That’s the product.
Try CompassNeed the judgement, not just the text? Book a consultation — the advisers behind the corpus handle the questions Compass is designed not to answer.
Compass is a research and screening tool; it is not legal advice.