Riley Betts awarded SMART: SCOTLAND funding for the Compliance Operator Framework
Riley Betts has been awarded SMART: SCOTLAND funding from Scottish Enterprise for the Compliance Operator Framework, a feasibility project for governed, auditable AI workflows in regulated financial environments. The project is Innovate UK funded through the Scottish Enterprise SMART: SCOTLAND award. The project officially began on 18 June 2026 and runs to 30 June 2027.
The project sits directly inside the Riley Betts thesis: AI systems can propose, reason, and orchestrate, but consequential action in regulated environments needs a separate control layer. The question is not whether an agent appears competent. The question is whether its proposed workflow can be governed, checked, traced, and explained before it changes financial state.
What the project is building toward
The Compliance Operator Framework is designed as a platform for AI-assisted workflows where reasoning and execution control are deliberately separated. Its research and engineering programme covers neuro-symbolic orchestration, State Goal Graph workflow modelling, controlled multi-agent autonomy, standards-based interoperability, and audit evidence for decisions and state transitions.
In plain English: the AI may assemble options, coordinate tasks, and suggest actions, but the operating framework should make it possible to see what was proposed, why it was allowed or blocked, and what evidence exists for that decision.
Why SMART support matters
SMART: SCOTLAND is a Scottish Enterprise R&D grant programme for high-risk, ambitious innovation projects with commercial potential. For Riley Betts, the award is an important external trust signal: a public innovation body has backed feasibility work on the route from our governance architecture to a pre-commercial prototype.
That matters because regulated AI does not need another slide-deck control framework. It needs systems that can be inspected, challenged, and defended: workflows with traceable reasoning, controlled execution, and audit records created when decisions happen rather than reconstructed after the fact.
The work programme
The project runs across six work packages, from core architecture and State Goal Graph design through reasoning subsystems, workflow execution, interoperability, audit reporting, and integrated prototype testing. The final phase targets a secure cloud-deployable pre-commercial prototype and use-case trials.
We will keep public updates focused on what can be shared responsibly: the problem, the architecture, the progress of the work, and the partnership opportunities it opens.
Opening conversations
The award strengthens the track record behind Riley Betts, but it is not the destination. The useful next conversations are with organisations exploring agentic AI in financial workflows, partners working on governed autonomy, and teams that need auditability before they can safely put AI near consequential action.