AIP Podcast EP 71 - Productivity Without Behavior Change with Triyo’s Approach to Compliance

In this episode, Rajiv Chatterjee, Co-Founder and CEO of Triyo, joins host Anne to share how his company is reinventing compliance and reporting for the financial industry. Rajiv discusses his journey from building enterprise tech in San Francisco to founding Triyo in Toronto, and how a project helping U.S. veterans reintegrate into their communities inspired Triyo’s mission: driving transparency and adoption without forcing behavioral change.

Rajiv explains how Triyo transitioned from “nice-to-have” workflow tools to becoming essential for regulatory reporting, enabling institutions to reduce manual work, enhance accuracy, and establish trust with regulators. He also discusses why simplicity at the surface—paired with complexity under the hood—is key for adoption in compliance-heavy industries.

Follow AIP Affiliate, Triyo
Website: https://triyo.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/triyosoft/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@triyo6182

Follow AI Partnerships
Website: https://www.aipartnershipscorp.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aipartnershipscorp/
X: https://twitter.com/AIPartnerships

The AIP Podcast is hosted by Anne Cheng, on behalf of the AI Partnerships, a Railtown company

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If you asked anyone 20 years ago, why would a person give five bucks to buy an overpriced coffee every day, they would call you crazy. Or why would a person drink a disgusting tasting drink in a small can and give money away for it? That would be magical thinking. But the world today embraces Starbucks and Red Bull all the same, thanks to how these companies pioneered changes in our everyday behaviors. But walk into any investment bank today, and you'll see the exact same behaviors you've seen for the last century. Legacy systems that never change and the excuse of regulations as a deterrent to change. Hello everybody, and welcome back to the AIP podcast. I am your host and Chang on behalf of the AI Partnerships Corps, and today our guest, Rajeev Chetuji, is the founder of an AI company called Trio. Now, Rajeev is on a mission to tackle perhaps the most difficult challenges known to men: changing their minds without changing their behaviors. Rajeev, brilliant to have you here with us today.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Oh, thank you for having me, Annie. I'm super excited. Um, my journey has taken me from early stage startups in San Francisco to New York and in Toronto. And along the way, I've been just been obsessed with one thing is that how can we get critical technology adopted and remove friction from work and make it easy for people? Super excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Thanks, Rajiv. And you literally just mentioned you went from San Francisco to London to Toronto. So tell our audience your backstory and really the impetus that led you to founding Trio.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

I've been in enterprise workforce before it was fashionable. So I started my life in uh San Francisco, was an early employee, we pioneered XML-based document management, and finally it was acquired by Storia, which was a Xerox subsidiary, and that's how my journey started. But then I moved to Toronto. It was supposed to be a one-year project. I'm still here. I loved the city, I loved everything, and I'm still here. And then I'm a big part of the Canadian ecosystem. But what happened? I saw this recurring theme at large organizations, specifically financial institutions, which was like, why do such smart people work with less than smart tools and do so much of manual work? And that just kept me thinking that that must be a better way to do things. And that's where we are today. That's what Trio does.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

That's amazing. And our pre-show call, you know, you mentioned being asked through your previous work to help returning army vets to have a soft landing. Tell us more about how that inspired you pursuing this work that you have with Trio.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

So that work probably was one of the most meaningful professional work that I've ever done in my life. Having vets coming back to their country from critical missions and helping them settle down into their communities. So what we did and we worked with obviously you know the Brastacks from the US Army, but also with local community organizers and the local people to help each of these veterans settle down and provide the necessary support, financial, mental, health, and spiritual. Now, all of these are soft things, right? But the beauty of this is we used technology to make it happen. And while what we did was we captured the data from you know returning vets who was coming back to the witch community and overlaid that with which kind of support was available and had a dashboard and people were able to act proactively and make informed decisions. So that actually pioneered and gave me that impetus that there must be a better way to do things for larger organizations. How can we take this to make better things happen? So that is the project that was initial inspiration for what you see today at Trio, transparency without behavior change.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

That's brilliant. Well, let's move on to the financial industry. You mentioned, you know, in our pre-show call that Stripe was an inspiration to wanting to change the way that people work in the financial industry. So, how did you go from a nice to have to a need to have? And how can our audience learn from this?

SPEAKER_00 4:53

The coalition brothers have been an inspiration for me. And they coined a term called latent problem. So, what they did, let me just do so for the audience to know in case you know, they completely disrupted the payments industry with one stroke of genius, which was they made it simple. The complexity was under the hood, but not in human interaction. And to me, that is how technology should be and how we should be working. So, you know, your question was how would we change this? Previously, when we initially launched the product, we knew reducing behavioral change or taking it out completely was a key point. But that was only one piece of the puzzle. The other was that how do we make this reporting critical to organizations? So we realized that there was a lot of manual work and errors involved in doing regulatory reporting. And so once we shifted our focus from nice to have work processes to critical work processes that regulatory filing, that just changed the paradigm. It was a quintessential shift whereby people are like, Wow, I can get all this reporting with proper guidelines without manual work and yet have the verification trust and track back. That is a game changer. So that was that's how it happened. And then to me, the collision brothers, how they disrupted an old industry which was you know was very difficult to where we are today, was the critical thing that we we were able to put into place.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

That's brilliant. You've obviously entered into an industry that's really, really massive, reg tech or regulatory technologies, but it's really a steep learning curve for most. How do you help regulated entities achieve compliance easily? And do you think doing so will have adverse effects, especially where regulated or licensed professionals simply tick a checkbox in order to stay compliant, but completely leave the ethics out the door?

SPEAKER_00 6:59

I feel all of us can play together. It is not either or. I think we have to change this conversation. So to me, the way we look at it, the Rectech is massive. Let's tackle what we can right now under the circumstances we can. So what we are doing, we're very specifically focused on certain reporting for AML, which is suspicious transaction requests, suspicious activity requests, LFTR, ECTR. Now, let's hone our skills and get the comfort level going with our end users and also with the regulators. That's number one. Number two, I think there's a misnomer that simplicity and efficiency cannot go together. And this is another person I get inspiration from, which is Tesla. You sit in Tesla car. Your first reaction is what am I supposed to do? This is just a screen, right? Similarly, what we have done with Trio, it's simple for sure. We have a we have a simple product, people go in, but the complexity is underneath the hood. So thereby the end users can focus on the things that matter to them more, the investigators, the guardrails, the compliance, the the true requirements of is this suspicious or not, as opposed to doing manual work of shifting gear like in Tesla shifting gears. No, we are focused on making sure the car goes from place A to place B. Similarly, what we are focused here, with our simplicity, ensuring that the regulators get what they want and the investigators are able to provide with minimum lift and change behavior what is required. So that's what it is to me.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Really, that's um really, really uh smart thinking. And so, you know, it's been a really lovely chat thus far, but it's almost time for us to wrap things up. One for the road, um, let's talk a little bit about what's on your horizon, Rajeev.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

On my horizon, my life, I'm first of all, I'm very blessed in every way to be doing what I'm passionate about. So it's very simple. I want to be a better father, uh better son, and a better human being every day. Once we do that, I can be a better colleague, a better leader, and a better CEO. That is core ethos and ethics of the company. Every day, when we come to office with that thing, we provide our customers with a better value. Now, obviously, from a from a vision perspective, we look to be the number one players in Canada as opposed to enabling these financial institutions to embrace AI and critical processes. While doing so, we're also doing some great work in the US, which you will we which you will hear down the line. But our big vision is providing ethical AI in regulatory space to our customers and the financial industries on the whole. And that's what we see doing today.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

That's brilliant. Well, Rajiv, it's been excellent having you on the call with us today. Thank you so much for joining us. And to our audience, if you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to like, share, and follow this podcast and send this to someone who can benefit from our episode. Once again, my name is Ann Cheng, and I am speaking on behalf of the AIK podcast. My guest has been Rajiv Chatterjee of Trio. Stay safe out there, folks.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Thank you.