Vistra’s Journey to Building an Agentic AI Hub for Business Services

Entity management involves keeping up-to-date records of ownership, so businesses can meet compliance and tax regulations. It’s a process that’s getting slower and pricier. Global average time to complete corporate-secretarial tasks rose 14 percent and costs rose 3 percent year-on-year in 2024 across 180 jurisdictions, according to Mercator, a provider of entity management. Know your customer (KYC) onboarding is also hurting growth, with 74 percent of asset managers reporting they lost investors due to slow, complex onboarding in 2024, and nearly two-thirds spending over 30 percent of compliance budget on KYC, according to Fenergo, a maker of compliance software.

In early 2025, Vistra, a Singapore-based company backed by EQT that helps clients navigate legal entity management, financial, HR operations and fund administration, launched Geni, an AI-native compliance agent, to solve exactly these problems. Instead of filling out forms or chasing email threads, the user describes their needs in plain language. Geni interprets the request, taps into Vistra’s proprietary data and then executes routine actions – such as KYC refreshes or statutory filings – looping in humans when necessary.

Operating in highly regulated markets, Vistra built in trust by design. Models run in a private Vistra cloud with robust cybersecurity controls and are trained solely on Vistra’s proprietary data with no leakage to public LLMs. Each answer includes a link to its source for auditability, and a dedicated team reviews output to refine prompts and guardrails. Crucially, every workflow leaves room for human oversight: one click connects the user to a certified specialist who can validate or override the AI’s recommendation.

Vistra’s value proposition

At the core of Vistra’s value proposition is trust, so human accountability stays front and center. Geni performs the heavy lifting – gathering real‑time data, drafting first versions, flagging anomalies – while certified professionals review, refine and sign off. The result is a multiplier effect: experts spend more time on nuanced judgment calls and less on repetitive preparation.

AI is also raising internal productivity. Vistra’s Board Minute Maker records meetings, applies jurisdiction‑specific rules and drafts compliant minutes, trimming hours of manual work to a quick expert review. Geni also doubles as an always‑on tutor for Vistra employees. They can ask questions – “How do we handle a Luxembourg deregistration?” – and get an answer sourced from Vistra’s own best‑practice archive in seconds, instead of digging through handbooks.

Today, Geni covers legal‑entity management, but over the next 12-18 months, it will grow into a single portal for every Vistra service – compliance, accounting, tax, HR ops and fund administration – by integrating agentic AI, workflow engines and data dashboards. In parallel, the company is running pilots exploring agent‑driven document classification, anomaly detection in data records, and generative drafting of complex cross‑border filings.

I believe agentic AI will fundamentally flip the corporate services model from periodic, people‑intensive engagements to continuous, real‑time service. Routine compliance tasks will be executed autonomously, while professionals focus on proactive advisory work.

Firms that marry deep regulatory expertise with robust AI governance will set new benchmarks for speed, transparency and cost efficiency.