Build once, adapt everywhere: How AI workflows can scale across markets

DAMIAN Leach has a big task at hand.

Since joining Vistra as its first chief AI and digital officer in April, he has been charged with setting up a fully cloud-based infrastructure, streamlining legacy hardware, building digital strategy and client-facing software, infusing AI across the organisation and unifying data across the business so that teams and AI tools worldwide are working from the same information. The list goes on.

The scale adds to the challenge. Vistra is a global business with offices in more than 50 markets and a presence across 100 jurisdictions. It serves around 65,000 clients worldwide in corporate services, fund administration, wealth management and multi-country payroll.

Operating at that scale means information and processes can stretch across systems developed at different times, for different purposes and for different markets.

For example, a client relationship may sit across separate systems – such as company incorporations in one market and fund administration in another – making it harder to build a connected view of the client and the wider business, and to apply AI consistently across both.

Vistra wants to change that.

“We want to build an AI-infused digital capability and give our clients one connected experience, from incorporations and fund administration to wealth management and payroll,” says Leach.

Vistra aims to deliver a unified digital experience while laying the groundwork for widespread AI adoption. For a business handling massive volumes of routine, highly regulated work across borders, that foundation is critical – allowing AI to absorb the repetitive tasks so its specialists can focus on higher-value advisory work.

Leach – who previously held global technology C-level roles at Seaco, Workday and Standard Chartered Bank – will move the company from AI experimentation to enterprise-wide production: building the data foundations, connecting fragmented systems and embedding AI into live client workflows.

To achieve this, by 2028, Leach aims to shift the company away from eight fixed data centres towards a fully cloud-based infrastructure, while simplifying, consolidating and refactoring its legacy applications onto a modern and AI native code base.

As those systems change, Vistra must keep its applications and data connected so that it can continue operating and develop new digital and AI-enabled services.

Moving to the cloud, however, will not by itself bring together information currently spread across its business. For this to happen, Leach also wants to establish what he calls a “single golden source of all data”.

Workato supports this broader transformation by connecting and orchestrating applications and automating the flow of data and work between them.

Data flow across evolving technology environment

Vistra is using Workato to connect legacy and newer platforms, and turn common business processes into reusable workflows.

“Workato will be the glue that binds our applications, platforms and experiences together,” says Leach.

Vistra’s partnership with Workato marks a departure from its previous approach to automation. Before Leach joined Vistra, automated solutions were task-based, fixed and built using traditional robotic process automation tools which are complex to manage and adapt as needs change. Bots were built to solve one particular problem, but these bots were single use and could not easily be reused elsewhere.

“For me, that wasn’t scalable,” says Leach. Before he joined, Vistra had already begun experimenting with AI, giving access to AI tools to 9,000 colleagues across the organisation. Since his arrival, Leach has built on that foundation, equipping 2,500 users with additional build capability.

With the knowledge and experience gained during this phase, the company identified over 100 AI prototypes that it is now evaluating for full production.

When Leach saw that the larger use cases needed a far more industrial approach, his solution was to build reusable automated workflows, or “recipes”, which can perform business processes but also be adapted for different markets or requirements.

“Using Workato, the code can be configured as skills, combined and reused to underpin a working AI agent,” he says.

Take the Know Your Customer (KYC) check as an example. The broad KYC process may be common across Vistra, but particular steps can differ among jurisdictions because regulatory requirements vary. A basic recipe can therefore be reused while incorporating the requirements of individual markets.

One application is name-screening during the onboarding of new clients as part of Vistra’s corporate and private client solutions. For one client, Vistra needs to screen between 20,000 and 30,000 individual names, checking each against various sources as part of the KYC process.

“That is a great problem for AI to solve, to provide auditable results for fully transparent decision making,” says Leach.

Rather than having colleagues search different sources and repeat the same checks, Vistra is developing a workflow using Workato and AI that retrieves information from approved sources and internal systems, performs the required cross-checks and brings the results together for a human to review.

“Human oversight in our compliance workflows is by design,” says Leach. “AI handles the volume and consistency, and our specialists bring the expert judgement. That combination is what gives our clients confidence.”

Vistra is also using Workato’s agentic build tools to accelerate how its engineering teams develop and release new digital services, enabling faster iteration as regulations and client needs evolve.

Compliance and people in the loop

That combination of automation and human oversight is being applied to Vistra’s private wealth, trust and family office business, with its first deployment in Singapore and plans to extend it to other markets.

Before taking on a client, Vistra may need to establish how that person accumulated their wealth. This can involve reviewing numerous documents and tracing financial transactions over many years. AI extracts and compares information from these records, flagging inconsistencies for colleagues to examine more closely. The checks performed and decisions made are recorded, creating an audit trail that Vistra can refer to later.

“We’re in the process of scaling that right now, and putting that into full production,” says Leach.

For Vistra, deploying AI across a highly regulated global business also means the technology has to evolve with regulatory requirements.

In Singapore, it has registered with the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s AI Verify initiative, which Leach says gives the company access to third-party testing of production-ready AI systems. Vistra is also following Monetary Authority of Singapore guidelines and adapting its internal compliance processes as those requirements evolve.

Singapore’s approach is attracting attention beyond its shores, Leach adds. At a recent forum, he spoke with regulators from Europe, the Philippines and the US who, he says, cited Singapore as a reference point as they developed their own approaches to AI.

Moving experiments into production

As Vistra operates across multiple markets, its ability to adapt automated workflows as rules change is important.

“Using Workato and the various other tools and services that we’re building with, we’ve got an iterative approach to our development lifecycle and we can make changes very, very quickly if processes and regulations change,” says Leach.

Vistra is now applying that approach more widely. The company is putting more than 40 use case ideas through an extended hackathon involving teams of 80 engineers and business users worldwide, using Workato and other tools.

The aim is to turn the strongest ideas into prototypes, then if they show business value, convert the prototypes into full solutions that can be deployed globally and across the business.

For Leach, that would take Vistra beyond the productivity gains already being delivered by individual AI agents, towards automating more complete business processes and embedding them into global colleague and client experiences.

He points to work already in progress on Vistra Digital, the platform where clients can self-serve to manage their global entity portfolios. Tasks like appointing a new company director, which currently involve multiple manual steps, are being rebuilt as fully automated workflows.

“We’ll start to see these AI and automated solutions embedded into our client experiences at scale as well as infused into our enterprise as we transform and agentify our business,” says Leach.

“I’m very confident the productivity uplift for both our colleagues and clients will be quite profound in some months to come.”

Find out how Workato helps organisations turn AI experiments into solutions that scale.