Cross-Border Compliance Platform Where Country Rules Are Data

The Challenge

The platform helps two organisations in different legal systems get from first contact to an access agreement, with a defensible record of every step. Matching them is the easy part. The hard part is that national rules differ in shape, not just in degree: one country needs consent and benefit-sharing terms as application documents, another files first and identifies consent-givers afterwards. Parts of the law are also unsettled, and a design that guesses is wrong in every country at once.

Country Rules as Versioned Data

Each country pathway is one versioned file checked against a JSON Schema and loaded live, with no release. The engine contains no country name, and a script scans the application code to prove it. A third country can arrive as a file, be validated, and run through a simulated case to completion, with no deployment. The RFP said a dry run needing code changes has failed. This one needed a file.

• Eight variables per pathway and nine obligation classes in the schema
• Per-country state machines, including parallel permits from two authorities
• A pathway simulator that runs fictional parties through the whole journey

Evidence on Every Rule

Every legal value carries one of five marks: the text of the law, the platform’s reading of it, unresolved, not yet researched, or a platform rule that is not law. A bare yes or no is rejected. The distinction matters because nobody has established this and the law is silent here are different facts, and a blank cell has to say which one it is.

Unknowns Stop, Deadlines Never Approve

When a step depends on an unresolved value, the engine stops that step only, keeps the rest of the case running and raises a question to a named person. Nothing defaults and nothing is assumed. A missed statutory deadline changes one thing: a remedy becomes available to the applicant. Only an explicit grant or refusal moves the permit state, so silence can never be read as approval.

Audit and Confidentiality by Design

Every action is written to a hash-chained audit trail, so editing one event shows exactly where verification breaks. Before two parties match, each record is projected to the level the viewer has earned. Unearned fields are never sent to the browser, which is enforced in the core API and not on screen. Human judgment steps require a named reviewer and a written rationale, not a checkbox.

From Prototype to MVP

The proposed MVP covers the smallest complete journey: accounts, organisations and seats, discovery with staged disclosure, mutual interest, country pathways, due diligence, versioned agreements with a sealed record, an admin console and the audit trail. Architecture is kept simple on purpose, with one modular service, PostgreSQL, object storage and one compose file, so the client’s own team can run it. Hosting and personal data stay in the EU, and the source code passes to the client under a permissive licence.