From Frustration to Foundation: The Story Behind ChatKYC

There's a moment that most founders can point to — the moment the idea stopped being a passing thought and became something they had to build. For us, it started with a very specific kind of frustration, a laptop screen full of underwhelming AI output, and one compliance professional who'd had enough.

This is the story of how ChatKYC came to be, what it does, and the two people behind it.

The Problem That Wouldn't Go Away

If you work in compliance, you already know the reality: your days are shaped by documentation. Policies, risk assessments, frameworks, gap analyses, audit and regulator ready materials. The regulatory landscape demands a relentless output of detailed, accurate, jurisdiction-specific documents.

And for most compliance teams, the process of creating those documents hasn't fundamentally changed in years. You start from scratch, or you work from a template that gets you 40% of the way there, and then you spend hours — sometimes days and weeks, layering in the specificity, the regulatory references, and the depth that your firm actually needs.

It's skilled, painstaking work. And there simply aren't enough hours in the day.

Where Generic Falls Short

When large language models entered the mainstream, some compliance professionals were among the first to see the potential but were also among the first set of AI users to hit a wall.

Omasirichukwu Anyanwu, ChatKYC's co-founder and director of Compliance, was one of them. A compliance consultant working as an authorised Head of Compliance and MLRO, he was an early adopter of generative AI tools.

Having been a former tech founder of a CRM and booking platform for small businesses, (Genus) Omasirichukwu had an active interest in following tech developments and had been following the development of LLMs closely. He experimented with multiple LLMs paying for the highest-tier subscriptions to LLMs including ChatGPT and Claude.

Omasirichukwu was determined to put it to work on the compliance documents he spent his days producing.

However, the outputs were surface-level; they read like someone had skimmed a textbook rather than lived inside a regulatory framework. The documents lacked the depth, the jurisdictional precision, and the level of detail that any compliance professional would need before putting their name to a document or handing it to an auditor. They weren't workable documents. They were starting points at best, and often not even that.

So Omas did what most compliance professionals do, he went back to creating the documents himself. The AI became a template generator, useful for structure, perhaps, but nowhere near the standard required for production-ready compliance work.

The generic tools simply weren't built for this.

A Product Leader Sees the Pattern

Meanwhile, Christiana Anyanwu, ChatKYC's co-founder and Chief Product Officer, was watching the vertical AI space evolve. With over a decade of product leadership across fintech, healthtech, and regulated industries, she had a keen eye for where specialised tools outperform general-purpose ones.

At the time, she was using ChatPRD — a purpose-built AI tool designed specifically for product managers to generate product requirements documents. It wasn't trying to be everything to everyone. It understood the domain, spoke the language, and produced output that product professionals could actually work from.

The lightbulb moment was straightforward: if a specialised AI tool could transform how product managers create PRDs, the same model could transform how compliance professionals create regulatory documents.

The compliance space was a perfect fit. The documents follow recognisable structures. The regulatory frameworks are well-defined. The quality bar is high but codifiable. And critically, the professionals creating these documents were already time-poor and underserved by generic AI.

Meet the Founders

Omasirichukwu Anyanwu — Co-founder & Compliance Director. Omasirichukwu is a compliance consultant who works as an authorised Head of Risk, Head of Compliance and MLRO. His subject matter expertise and hands-on experience across regulatory frameworks shapes everything Obira, ChatKYC's regulatory intelligence engine produces. He knows what auditors and regulators expect, where most tools fall short, and what "production-ready" actually means in a compliance context. He leads ChatKYC's public presence, sharing insights on regulation and the evolving role of AI in risk and compliance.

Christiana Anyanwu — Co-founder & Chief Product Officer. Christiana brings over a decade of product leadership across fintech, healthtech, and regulated industries — from higher education digital services to enterprise AI platforms. She leads product strategy, technology, and go-to-market at ChatKYC, driven by a straightforward conviction: compliance professionals deserve tools built specifically for them.

What Comes Next

ChatKYC is live, and we're building in the open — listening, iterating, and refining based on real-world usage. If you're a risk and compliance practitioner working on documentation, process, strategy, training or analysis, we built this for you.

Get started with ChatKYC →

ChatKYC is operated by Oganiru Advisory Ltd. Follow our journey on LinkedIn.