Today we're announcing a partnership with The General Consulting Company (The GCC), a Toronto-based AI transformation firm for regional banks and credit unions in Canada. The GCC embeds AI engineers inside financial institutions and takes them from a board-approved AI policy to bespoke systems in production. Its clients include Canadian financial institutions with billions in assets. The GCC will now deploy Aide's governed AI agents for customer and member service at the institutions it works with. Aide's team will work alongside The GCC's engineers to map where AI agents can resolve customer requests, build and test each Scenario, and support each institution over the long term.
Both companies are based in Toronto and built for the same kind of customer: regulated institutions where a wrong answer has real consequences, and where AI has to operate inside approved procedures, under the institution's own policy.
Together, we're taking Canadian regional banks and credit unions from a board-approved AI policy to AI agents in production, under that policy, with every action tested, checked, and logged before a customer or member sees it.
Why we're doing this
Most regional banks and credit unions now have an AI policy their board has approved. Very few have an AI agent in production that operates under it. The gap between the two is a deployment problem: someone has to sit inside the institution, learn how customer service actually runs, decide which requests AI should handle and which should stay human, and prove the agent works before anyone puts it in front of a customer.
Regional banks and credit unions are regulated institutions. A wrong answer about a payment, a limit, or an account is not just a poor experience. It is a compliance event, and the institution answers for it. That is why most vendor AI stalls at the policy stage: the board can approve a principle, but no one can show the compliance team what the agent will and will not do, or prove afterward what it did. Governance is not a feature for this buyer. It is the precondition.
That work takes hands-on engineering and deep familiarity with how each institution runs: its core banking system, its policy, its people. It doesn't happen from a vendor's office. The GCC's model is to embed engineers inside the institution and leave the capability with the institution's own team. That is exactly the delivery model governed AI needs.
Aide is the platform built for that work. The Agent Governance Engine puts every customer and member experience team in control of what the customer-facing AI agent does. It acts only on the requests it has been authorized for, only when it is certain, and escalates the rest. Every action is tested before deployment and is logged and auditable for compliance. Our live customer accounts run at 76%+ automated resolution, and because the engine ensures agents only act when they are certain, what they handle, they get right.
"The hard part isn't building an AI demo. It's building an agent that knows what it should not do," said Ziyad Basheer, founder and CEO of Aide. "Banks and credit unions understand that better than almost anyone. A wrong answer about someone's money has real consequences. The GCC already works inside these institutions and takes governance as seriously as we do. That is the partner you want between a board-approved policy and a live customer conversation."
"The main question for regional banks and credit unions is which parts AI should touch and which parts should stay human," said Nelson Lee, founding partner of The General Consulting Company. "Aide makes that decision explicit, one request at a time, and enforces it in production. It lets us deploy AI under an institution's own policy rather than asking the board to trust a vendor's defaults."
What the work will look like
An engagement starts with a small team from The GCC inside the institution, working with the customer service leaders, the compliance team, and the people who run the core banking and CRM systems. With Aide, they map every reason customers and members reach out, then decide, one request type at a time, what the AI agent will resolve on its own, what it will draft for a person to review, and what stays fully human.
Consider a regional bank or credit union whose service team handles a few thousand emails and chats a month. A customer asks why a pre-authorized payment was returned. Another wants to raise an e-transfer limit before the weekend. A third is locked out of online banking. These requests are predictable, the answers live in systems the institution already has, and each is governed by a clear procedure. Fraud disputes, hardship conversations, and mortgage decisions stay with the people who should be having them.
The institution goes live with Aide's agentic AI for member experience gradually. Start small. Prove it works. Expand from there. The GCC stays embedded through that expansion, and the capability stays with the institution's own team: they see every decision, they set the confidence bar, and they decide what gets added next.
Governance first
Everything runs under the institution's own AI policy. The agent acts only inside the procedure the institution approved, only when it is certain, and hands everything else to a person. Judgment, emotion, and compliance risk stay human by design.
Every action is logged for audit, so the compliance team and the regulator can see what the agent did, why it did it, and what happened next. Aide is SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR and HIPAA compliant. This is the AI agent your compliance team signs off on. You can read more about how Aide approaches AI governance for customer service and how it works in financial services.
The GCC has argued that the relationship between a financial institution and the people it serves isn't being threatened by AI. It's being eroded by wait times, stretched teams, and unresolved requests. We would add one more: a wrong answer. Governed AI agents, deployed by engineers who work inside the institution, address all of them. Canada's regional banks and credit unions should not have to choose between putting AI in front of their customers and staying compliant. With this partnership, they don't.
To learn more about deploying Aide at your bank or credit union, get a demo or contact our team at sales@aide.app. To learn more about The General Consulting Company, visit thegeneralconsultingcompany.com.