WealthAi has launched an artificial intelligence compliance tool for wealth managers and family offices, aimed at replacing spreadsheet-based monitoring of client communications.

The system uses AI agents to review communications in real time and generate audit records for compliance teams. It is being developed with input from industry partners including Saranac Partners and Patronus Partners.

Compliance monitoring is becoming a bigger issue for wealth management firms as regulators intensify scrutiny of how they assess financial crime and market abuse risks. Recent reviews by the Financial Conduct Authority found weaknesses in firms’ risk assessments and in how controls are linked to day-to-day operations.

WealthAi’s product is built around three agents. One is a compliance portal for chief compliance officers and their teams, with a dashboard of flagged communications and audit trails. Another is a Market Abuse Regulation agent for money laundering reporting officers and surveillance teams, designed to identify signs of insider dealing, market manipulation and front-running in communications.

A third tool, described as a trade surveillance agent, lets firms upload trade data from brokerages or custodians and link those records to relevant communications. This is intended to help compliance staff assess risk at transaction level rather than reviewing messages in isolation.

The system draws data from channels including Global Relay, Microsoft Outlook, WhatsApp and Teams. Its output is designed to meet FCA requirements.

Regulatory focus

The launch comes as wealth managers face pressure to show that their monitoring systems reflect how their businesses actually operate. Sample-based reviews remain common across the sector, but critics argue that selective checks can leave firms exposed if problematic messages or trading patterns fall outside the sample.

WealthAi is pitching the software as an alternative by analysing all communications rather than a subset. It says this reduces the operational risks associated with manual reviews and spreadsheet-based processes.

The company is also working on support for regulators outside the UK, including FINMA, JFSC and Consob, as it expands into Switzerland, Jersey and Italy. Additional agents for transaction reporting and suitability monitoring are also in development.

Jason Nabi, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of WealthAi, said: “Compliance and risk are the foundation on which client trust in wealth management is built – which is why we made it one of our first use cases. For too long, compliance teams have been asked to meet increasingly demanding regulatory requirements with tools that simply weren’t built for the job. Spreadsheets and sample-based monitoring leave gaps, and those gaps carry real risk. We believe AI can change that, not by replacing compliance professionals, but by giving them the tools to do their jobs with far greater confidence and far less friction.”

WealthAi has set up a steering group with wealth management firms to guide development of the product. Saranac Partners and Patronus Partners are among those involved, providing feedback as the system evolves.

This suggests the company is seeking close engagement with potential users in a sector where compliance processes are heavily shaped by internal controls, regulatory interpretation and record-keeping requirements. Tools that touch regulated workflows often require firms to be comfortable with how alerts are generated, documented and reviewed.

Partner feedback

Support from named wealth managers gives WealthAi early external backing as it tries to build credibility in a market that remains cautious about artificial intelligence in regulated functions. Firms have been more willing to use AI for administrative tasks than in areas directly involving surveillance, record-keeping and regulatory reporting.

Philip Dench, Head of Risk & Compliance at Saranac Partners, said: “WealthAi has the potential to revolutionise compliance monitoring and risk management, saving an incredible amount of time spent manually searching for key data.”

Penny Rooney, Compliance Director at Patronus Partners, added: “WealthAi aims to help compliance teams focus on the higher value key tasks by gathering data and automating workflows that can be time consuming. This offers the promise of far greater focus on proactive support of the business, with confidence in the data governance and robustness of the process.”

WealthAi said the compliance product is designed to fit into existing workflows rather than replace them outright. The wider platform includes tools for portfolio managers and a desktop assistant that links staff to different AI agents across front, middle and back-office work.

The business also offers access to third-party data and service providers through its marketplace and says its data layer connects to more than 250 custodians and banks. Investors include Fuel Ventures and Founders Factory.

The launch places WealthAi in a fast-growing area of financial technology, as firms try to apply artificial intelligence to surveillance, risk management and operational control without removing human oversight from regulated decisions.

KAREN JOY BACUDO

Finance Editor

Online Oceans has raised £4 million to expand its autonomous surface vessel business in a funding round led by Seraphim Space.

The investment will support manufacturing, deployments and rising customer demand across defence and commercial markets. Other investors included Peter Rive, Co-Founder of SolarCity, Quantum Systems founders Frank Thieser and Florian Seibel, and Koro Capital.

Online Oceans builds autonomous surface vessels and fleet software for maritime surveillance and security. Its products are designed for governments and commercial operators seeking longer-duration monitoring of coastal waters, ports, borders, strategic chokepoints and subsea infrastructure.

The company was founded in 2025 by George Morton and Alistair Douglas. Morton leads the business, while Douglas oversees command-and-control software and fleet systems.

Fleet system

At the centre of its system is Scout, a compact solar-powered autonomous surface vessel. It is paired with Tether, a cloud-based command platform that allows operators to manage missions, monitor assets and review data in real time.

Online Oceans has designed the system for dense fleet deployment rather than occasional missions by individual vessels. It argues that existing maritime coverage often depends either on crewed ships with high operating costs or on autonomous systems that are too expensive to deploy at scale.

The funding comes amid growing concern over maritime security, including the protection of subsea cables, offshore energy assets, ports and coastal borders. Pressure on defence budgets has also increased interest in lower-cost systems that can stay at sea for longer.

Online Oceans says it is already working with initial customers in defence, maritime domain awareness and ocean data. It has also begun data sales, and its first months of production were sold out ahead of commercial deliveries.

Security use

The company is also in discussions about using its autonomous surface fleets for coastal and offshore security missions in the Gulf. Those talks include early warning of incoming aerial threats through acoustic and optical sensing, passive acoustic monitoring of the subsea environment to detect submarines and uncrewed underwater vehicles, and surface intelligence and surveillance tasks such as AIS spoofing detection and visual monitoring.

Online Oceans is part of a broader push in Europe to build defence and security technology closer to home as governments reassess vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure. Maritime surveillance has become a particular concern as attacks on subsea infrastructure and wider geopolitical tensions expose gaps in continuous monitoring.

Its approach is based on deploying larger numbers of lower-cost vessels connected to a central software platform. That differs from patrol models built around a smaller number of expensive assets, which can leave stretches of water monitored only intermittently.

Investor view

Seraphim Space is known for backing companies in the space and deep technology sectors. Its involvement adds to a group of investors with backgrounds in clean technology, aerospace and autonomous systems.

Online Oceans says it moved from first builds to a production ramp in little more than a year. That pace, along with early customer agreements, appears to have helped attract investors seeking defence technology with clearer paths to deployment.

Britain and other European countries have placed greater emphasis on maritime resilience as they assess the security of undersea energy and communications links. The issue has expanded beyond conventional naval defence to include surveillance of commercial infrastructure and the detection of covert activity near cables, pipelines and offshore sites.

For border agencies and coastguards, persistent monitoring is also tied to migration control, smuggling and illegal fishing. Autonomous fleets are appealing partly because they can extend surveillance without the crewing costs and maintenance burden of conventional patrol vessels.

George Morton, Co-Founder of Online Oceans, said: “Persistent maritime coverage has been too expensive for too long. That has limited what governments and operators can actually see, protect and respond to at sea. We built Online Oceans to change that. This funding allows us to scale production and support customers who need a far more practical way to monitor critical waters, protect infrastructure and maintain awareness over long periods.”

Haverty, Seraphim Space, said: “Online Oceans is building a category-defining company at the intersection of defence, maritime autonomy and data. The breakthrough here is not just a lower-cost vessel. It is a new coverage model: dense, persistent fleets that can monitor critical waters continuously rather than sporadically. What impressed us was not just the technical insight, but the speed of execution. In little over a year, the team has moved from founding to production ramp, early customer traction and first data sales. We believe they have the potential to build a global leader in this category.”

The Chancery Lane Project has launched an open-source WordPress plugin that serves websites in a simplified format for AI systems. The UK nonprofit said the tool is intended to reduce data processing and energy use.

The plugin detects visits from known AI agents and large language model browsers, then delivers a stripped-down Markdown version of a page instead of the full HTML. This gives AI systems the main content without navigation menus, scripts, and other elements designed for human browsing.

The software is free to use and can be adapted by other organisations. TCLP developed it initially for its own library of climate-focused contract clauses and legal guidance, which it says is used in more than 110 countries.

The launch comes as organisations consider how online content is read not only by people but also by AI tools used for search, research, drafting, and analysis. Websites are generally built as rich visual pages for human users, but AI systems often have to process those same pages in full before extracting the core text.

TCLP said this creates extra computational work and higher token use, raising energy demand. Early testing of the plugin showed reductions of up to 90% in token usage, according to the organisation.

The Chancery Lane Project is best known for publishing contract clauses intended to help lawyers and businesses address climate risks and emissions through legal agreements. It says it has published almost 200 climate clauses through work involving 3,600 professionals across 113 countries.

The new tool widens that work into the design of digital information systems. TCLP said the aim is to keep legal knowledge accessible as AI becomes a more common route to professional information.

Ben Metz, executive director of The Chancery Lane Project, outlined that rationale in comments accompanying the launch. “If climate action scales through law, then ensuring that legal knowledge can travel effectively in an AI-driven world is essential. Most websites are built for human users, not AI, which means systems often process large amounts of irrelevant data, increasing cost and energy use. For TCLP, this is about maintaining access to high-quality, climate-aligned legal content at a time when the way information is accessed is fundamentally changing. This plugin addresses that by delivering a clean, machine-readable version of content, enabling more efficient retrieval for tasks such as research, drafting, and analysis.”

Environmental impact

The launch also draws attention to the growing debate over the environmental footprint of AI systems and digital infrastructure. While much of that discussion has focused on data centres and model training, software design choices that reduce unnecessary processing are also becoming part of the conversation.

TCLP said the project received support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, which backs work on AI and digital infrastructure. The nonprofit described the plugin as a public good and said it wanted developers, charities, and commercial teams to be able to deploy or modify it.

Felix Cohen, director of digital at The Chancery Lane Project, linked the technical change to wider environmental questions. “Improving the efficiency of digital systems is not just a technical concern. It has real environmental implications.

“We see this as an opportunity to connect legal innovation, digital infrastructure, and climate outcomes practically.”

Supporters of the project argue that small efficiency gains can become meaningful when applied across widely used publishing systems such as WordPress. The software underpins a large share of the web, making it a useful starting point for experiments in simpler machine-readable publishing.

Nick Cain, vice president of strategy and innovation at the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, pointed to the cumulative effect of AI traffic online. “Every query processed and every token consumed carries computational and energy demands that compound across the modern web. At WordPress’s scale, a 90% reduction in token load translates into a substantive gain for the climate. This work reflects our belief that responsible AI infrastructure, built openly for any organisation to deploy, should serve both the public good and the planet.”

For TCLP, the plugin also reflects a practical response to changes in how users find specialist information. “Rather than a shift into technology, this is a continuation of TCLP’s role in enabling climate action through law,” Metz said.

“It’s an extension into the systems that shape how knowledge is accessed and applied.”