Mangold Fondkommission is an investment firm operating in a highly complex and densely regulated environment in the Swedish securities market. Listed on the Nasdaq Stockholm Main Market and authorised to conduct several investment services, Mangold must continuously navigate extensive EU legislation, Swedish law, as well as expectations from the regulatory authorities and other stakeholders.

Fredrik Styrlander, Head of Risk & Compliance, shares his views on navigating this regulatory landscape with Qura – and how it’s no longer enough just to be an expert in legal frameworks.

What are the main challenges when working in a regulated environment – and how are you and your team using technology to deliver a better end-product?

Working in a regulatory environment within financial services means navigating a large number of complex and substantial frameworks. This includes several layers of EU law, Swedish legislation, guidelines and opinions from the European banking, securities, and insurance agencies (EBA, ESMA and EIOPA), and of course the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority's guidelines and decisions.

This requires piecing together a mosaic from several different legal sources and understanding all levels of the regulatory framework and relevant perspectives, mapping out all aspects that bear on the issue at hand.

Using technology like Qura – which reliably and accurately identifies the relevant legal sources and can compile them into a legal analysis – saves time and ensures the quality of our work. I was genuinely surprised the first time I asked a complex question and immediately received an answer that covered all relevant regulatory layers and, as mentioned above, they are several, found in different sources and complex. Normally, this regulatory mosaic-work takes hours. With Qura, it was minutes.

How important is it for you to actively drive and monitor technology-related matters in order to stay at the forefront?‍

I would say that it is a must going forward and will be a significant part of complying with applicable regulations. As regulatory requirements become increasingly extensive and complex – both in their design and structure – our adoption of new tools and IT solutions becomes essential to working efficiently and maintaining a leading position in how we manage regulatory challenges.

AI-driven monitoring and curated datasets will be crucial. Tools that can consolidate incoming rules, assess relevance based on our institutional profile, and deliver structured updates – even personalised updates – will fundamentally change how compliance departments operate. Qura is far ahead here in my experience, and contributes with substantial real life value already in its present form and quickly developing its functions, where many other AI platforms still remain in ‘seeing the potential’ stage.

Do you have a concrete example of when Qura has helped you?

I recently handled a highly complex matter related to the Capital Requirements Regulation (CRR) for credit institutions. It involved navigating the connections between various definitions, rules, and overarching guidance from the European Banking Authority (EBA). Piecing that together manually by reviewing all relevant legal acts spanning several hundred pages would have taken several hours and significant effort to ensure that we identified all the relevant sources.

Qura provided an almost complete legal analysis through its AI tool which, after minor prompting and a brief quality review, reduced the work with the legal analysis from five hours to thirty minutes – while also making our handling of the issue more precise. Freeing up time for real value creating legal advisory.

What made you take the step to adopt Qura as your primary legal research platform? And how does Qura differ from other legal databases you have used in your daily work?

What convinced us was the combination of Qura having incorporated all relevant legal sources, created important connections between documents and definitions, and demonstrated an AI analysis tool that can actually provide credible answers to complex legal questions.

In my experience, if you ask the same question to another AI tool such as ChatGPT or similar, the quality of the answer is often directly incorrect and uninformative when dealing with complex legal issues. The reason, in my view, seems to be that these tools approach questions from an infinite universe of publicly available sources on the internet – without limiting themselves to legal sources and terminology, and lacking access to more specific sources that are not available to those models.

And as for the EU’s own databases – and many of the other traditional legal databases – these are not designed for practitioners who need to work fast. They are fragmented, difficult to navigate, and lack the internal structure needed to see how provisions relate. What Qura does really is a game-changer.

How do you view the risks of junior staff using AI?

There are two sides to this. As AI speeds up legal research and makes the legal analysis easier, which is an advantage in the daily operations, there is a real danger that junior staff lose the understanding of hierarchy, purpose, structure, and regulatory context, since they don’t have to go through the laborious work of going through all the sources manually. This can, to be clear, happen without AI as well with the human tendency to use Ctrl+F, but the risk is definitely higher now.

Juniors need to be trained in solid legal method and understanding of the sources, so that AI becomes a lever – not a crutch.

However the opportunity with AI is enormous: more time for real value creation such as risk assessments, real-world analysis, and high level business advisory.

How do you preserve human judgement and intuition in an AI-driven era?

It’s a real challenge. You must evolve. Being knowledgeable in the law is no longer enough. Real value resides in how you apply that knowledge in value creating activities based on the legal groundwork enabled and made quicker by AI, such as risk analysis, high level business advisory, process development and governance. The compliance expert of the future is not the person who knows the UCITS or MIFID II legal framework by heart. It is the one who knows how to, on the basis of that framework, deliver high-quality advisory, analysis, direction, judgment, and practical implementation. AI is a very powerful lever and tool if applied right – and there is no going back.

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