Greystone Capital

The challenge

Before

Greystone Capital is a boutique investment advisory firm with around 40 employees. Their compliance team was drowning in document routing and quarterly client reporting — the kind of repetitive judgement work that looks like a perfect AI use case until you read the regulatory rules. Leadership had been approached by half a dozen "AI for finance" SaaS vendors, each with a confident pitch and zero appreciation for the risk surface. The directors wanted a written, vendor-neutral read on where AI belonged in the operation — and, just as importantly, where it didn't.

• Compliance lead manually routing client documents across 4 reviewer queues
• Quarterly client reports drafted from scratch each cycle by ops team
• KYC pre-screen handled manually with no documented decision criteria
• Six "AI for finance" vendor pitches active simultaneously with no evaluation framework
• Leadership unsure which workflows carried regulatory risk if automated
• No internal benchmarks for hours-saved-per-workflow
• Previous SaaS trial abandoned mid-pilot because nobody had scoped the use case
• No written roadmap to take to the board for AI investment approval

The solution

What we built

We ran our 1-week paid AI Operations Audit. We interviewed the compliance lead, the ops director, and the head of client services. We walked the document-routing pipeline end-to-end, sat through a quarterly reporting cycle, and mapped the KYC pre-screen in detail. We scored 18 workflows on hours saved, automation complexity, and regulatory risk. The deliverable was a written report identifying three priority candidates: document classification (high leverage, low risk — green light), quarterly report drafting (medium leverage, medium risk, human-in-the-loop required), and a third candidate flagged in red — KYC pre-screen. We explicitly recommended against automating KYC without a human reviewer on every decision, with the regulatory reasoning written out. The client built doc classification internally using our roadmap as the brief.

How the system flows

1. Discovery interviews→compliance lead, ops director, head of client services
2. Workflow mapping→18 ops and compliance workflows scoped end-to-end
3. Risk scoring→regulatory exposure weighted alongside hours saved
4. Document routing analysis→4 reviewer queues mapped with decision criteria
5. Quarterly reporting cycle walkthrough→bottleneck identified at draft stage
6. KYC pre-screen review→flagged red, explicit no-go with regulatory reasoning
7. Priced roadmap→top 3 workflows scoped against real engagement budgets
8. Written report→PDF + Notion, formatted for board-level review