Compass | the first Cortex brain running inside banks
A regulatory intelligence model, purpose-trained by Onyx AI Labs and delivered through the SureStep GRC platform — running in production at financial institutions today.
Regulatory change analysis takes weeks. Generic LLMs hallucinate citations.
When a regulation changes, GRC teams have to work out what changed, which controls it touches, and what needs to be updated — traditionally a manual process spanning legal review, control gap analysis, and policy redesign.
Generic LLMs speed up drafting but introduce a new risk: they hallucinate section numbers and invent requirements with the same confident tone as correct answers. For a regulated institution, an uncited or wrong compliance answer is not a shortcut — it's a new source of risk.
A fine-tuned regulatory intelligence model, grounded in real regulatory text.
Compass retrieves answers from a curated corpus of 73K+ cited obligations across 20+ regulatory frameworks via RAG — not from model memory — so every answer traces back to a specific passage in the source text.
Model
A fine-tuned regulatory reasoning model, trained on curated regulatory corpora with citation-grounded output. Deployable on-premises or air-gapped, with a zero-telemetry option.
Knowledge
RAG retrieval over SureStep Meridian's regulatory corpus — the same structured, normalized regulatory data that Meridian maintains and Navigator draws on for its assessments.
Intelligence
Every response carries an Ed25519-signed receipt, batched into Merkle trees for efficient, independently verifiable audit trails.
Inside the SureStep GRC platform
Compass doesn't run in isolation — it's one layer of the SureStep platform. SureStep Meridian maintains the structured regulatory corpus that Compass retrieves from, and SureStep Navigator draws on Compass for the AI regulatory analysis behind its assessments.
Onyx AI Labs builds the model; SureStep, its sister company, delivers it as part of a governance, risk, and compliance platform used by financial institutions. Both companies were founded by C. Michael Gibbs and share 18 years of experience serving regulated industries.
The analysis phase, from weeks to hours
In SureStep Navigator, the regulatory analysis and applicability step — traditionally 2–4 weeks of manual legal and regulatory review — collapses to hours with Compass doing the retrieval and citation work. Implementation remains human-driven, but it now starts from a citation-grounded, verifiable foundation instead of a blank page.
Compass is one Cortex brain. What's yours?
If you need Compass specifically, it's sold as part of the SureStep GRC platform. If you need a purpose-trained, citation-grounded brain for your own industry, that's an Onyx engagement.