How a Southeast Asian Firm Transformed Regulatory Compliance

Singapore sits at the crossroads of Southeast Asia's regulatory landscape — a position that makes it both the natural base for advisory firms serving the region and the epicentre of a challenge that grows more complex with every passing year. The firm in this story is one of Singapore's most established advisory practices, founded in the late 1990s by a group of former Big Four partners who saw an opportunity to provide boutique-quality regulatory and structuring advice to multinational companies entering or expanding across ASEAN markets. Today the firm employs around sixty professionals across offices in Singapore, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Ho Chi Minh City.

The firm's core practice involves guiding clients through the regulatory requirements of doing business in Southeast Asia: banking licences in Indonesia, telecommunications permits in Vietnam, foreign ownership restrictions in the Philippines, investment approvals in Thailand, and the labyrinthine corporate registration requirements that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. For each client engagement, the firm produces a regulatory map — a visual representation of which entities need which approvals, from which authorities, in what sequence, and subject to what conditions.

For years, these regulatory maps were produced in PowerPoint. Partners and senior associates would sketch the regulatory landscape on whiteboards during internal planning sessions, and junior team members would translate those sketches into formatted slide decks. The diagrams were hand-drawn in the sense that every box, arrow, and annotation was manually placed. A typical regulatory map for a client entering three ASEAN markets might comprise fifteen to twenty slides and take a team of two associates three to five days to produce.

The fundamental problem was not the time required to create the diagrams, though that was significant. It was that the diagrams were static snapshots of a constantly shifting regulatory landscape. ASEAN regulatory frameworks change frequently — Indonesia alone has issued hundreds of new and amended regulations affecting foreign investment in the past five years. By the time a slide deck was finalised, reviewed by a partner, formatted by the firm's design coordinator, and sent to the client, the regulatory picture had often moved on. Partners found themselves caveating every presentation with a disclaimer that the information may have changed since the last update.

The managing partner had been aware of the problem for years but had not found a satisfactory solution. Generic diagramming tools like Visio or Lucidchart could produce better-looking diagrams than PowerPoint, but they did not solve the underlying issue: the diagram was still a static artefact disconnected from the regulatory data it represented. When a regulation changed, someone had to remember to update the diagram — and across dozens of active client engagements, updates were inevitably missed.

The firm encountered Juristic Structure through a referral from a European law firm that had adopted the platform for corporate structure mapping. The managing partner arranged a demonstration and immediately saw the potential for a different application: using Structure not to map corporate ownership chains, but to map regulatory frameworks. Each entity in a client's structure could be represented as a node, with regulatory requirements, licence statuses, approval chains, and cross-border dependencies attached as attributes and visual connections.

The pilot engagement was a complex one: a European financial services group seeking to establish operations across four ASEAN markets simultaneously — Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand. Each market had its own licensing regime, capital requirements, and foreign ownership restrictions. The interactions between the four regulatory frameworks created additional complexity: approvals in one jurisdiction were sometimes contingent on the status of applications in another.

The team built the client's regulatory landscape in a single Structure workspace over the course of a week. Each entity was represented as a node, with regulatory requirements attached: the type of licence needed, the issuing authority, the estimated processing time, required documentation, and any pre-conditions. Approval chains were mapped visually, showing which approvals depended on which prior steps. Cross-border dependencies — such as the requirement to demonstrate a functioning head office in Singapore before applying for certain licences in Indonesia — were represented as connections between nodes in different jurisdictional sections of the diagram.

The collaborative features proved particularly valuable from the outset. In multi-jurisdictional engagements, the firm's associates in different offices contribute to the same workspace. A regulatory specialist in the Jakarta office annotated the Indonesian licensing requirements while a tax advisor in Singapore updated the withholding tax obligations on cross-border payments — all in the same live diagram, visible to the entire team and the client in real time. The days of emailing updated slide decks between offices and hoping that everyone was working from the same version were over.

Clients received a link to a read-only view of their regulatory map and could explore the structure at their own pace. This capability transformed client interactions in ways the firm had not fully anticipated. Instead of receiving a dense slide deck and scheduling a call to have the partner walk them through it, clients could open the interactive diagram on their own screens, click into specific entities, explore the regulatory requirements for each jurisdiction, and arrive at advisory calls with focused, informed questions. The quality of client conversations improved markedly.

When regulations changed — as they frequently do across ASEAN — the firm updated the relevant workspace once, and every stakeholder with access saw the current picture instantly. The firm established a regulatory monitoring practice, assigning associates in each office to track regulatory developments in their jurisdiction and update the relevant Structure workspaces as changes occurred. For the first time, the firm's regulatory maps were living documents rather than periodic snapshots.

The impact on client retention was notable. Before the transition to Structure, many engagements followed a predictable pattern: the firm would produce an initial regulatory advisory, the client would act on it, and the relationship would conclude. With live regulatory maps, the value proposition shifted. Several clients who would previously have engaged the firm for a one-time advisory converted to ongoing retainer arrangements, with the firm maintaining and updating their regulatory maps on a quarterly basis. The maps became a standing reference that clients consulted whenever they considered expanding into a new market, restructuring their regional operations, or responding to a regulatory change.

The managing partner noted that client feedback shifted noticeably after the transition. Clients began asking more sophisticated questions because they could actually see the full picture — not just the jurisdiction they had originally asked about, but the interactions between jurisdictions that created both risks and opportunities. One client, a logistics company expanding across mainland Southeast Asia, identified a regulatory arbitrage opportunity in Vietnam that they would not have noticed from a static slide deck: a recently introduced incentive for regional headquarters entities that reduced the effective licensing burden for companies meeting certain criteria.

Training and adoption within the firm proceeded smoothly, though not without initial resistance from some senior practitioners who had produced PowerPoint regulatory maps for their entire careers. The turning point came when a senior partner used Structure during a live client presentation, updating the diagram in real time as the client raised questions about alternative structuring approaches. The client was visibly impressed, and the partner — who had been among the most sceptical — became one of the platform's most vocal advocates within the firm.

The firm's competitive position has strengthened measurably since the adoption. In three competitive pitch situations over the past year, the firm demonstrated its regulatory mapping approach using live Structure workspaces. All three pitches were successful, with clients citing the visual clarity and collaborative capability as differentiating factors. One client, the regional CFO of a Fortune 500 consumer goods company, told the managing partner that the firm's approach made the regulatory landscape comprehensible for the first time in his twenty years of working in the region.

Looking ahead, the firm is developing a library of template regulatory maps for each ASEAN jurisdiction, pre-populated with the standard licensing frameworks for the most common sectors: financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, and technology. New client engagements will begin with the relevant template, customised for the client's specific structure and requirements — reducing the time to first deliverable from a week to a matter of days. The managing partner describes the vision as building the definitive regulatory atlas of Southeast Asia, maintained in real time and accessible to every client the firm serves.