Rens Troost, Co-Founder & CTO at Rational Exponent – Interview Series

Rens Troost, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Rational Exponent brings over three decades of experience as a seasoned technology leader and repeat founder with a proven track record of converting innovation into shareholder value. He co-founded Virtual Clarity and NAME.COM, guiding both companies to successful exits, and has held executive and leadership roles at Lehman Brothers, Moore Capital Management/IMS, UBS AG, and DXC Technology. Rens has served on public company boards listed on NASDAQ and TSE, including NAME, SMTP.COM, and Sharpspring. His career spans early-stage startups to global enterprises, with a consistent focus on pragmatic transformation and strategic business growth.

Rational Exponent is a fintech company that helps banks and other regulated financial institutions turn complex policies into real-time, actionable intelligence. Its AI-driven platform, RE:Agent, embeds compliance and risk management directly into daily operations, enabling teams to monitor controls, automate tasks, and identify issues before they escalate. The company positions itself as a bridge between advanced AI capabilities and the practical demands of regulated industries, making large-scale transformation both safer and more efficient.

Given your track record in enterprise transformation and your history as a repeat founder, what ultimately convinced you that Rational Exponent needed to exist—and that an AI-first model was the only way to solve the compliance and risk challenges you were seeing? 

Rational Exponent had to exist because this is the biggest opportunity in our lifetimes to change how banking works. Done badly, AI will hollow out capability and hand control to a new set of monopolists. Done well, it collapses the translation layers inside organizations, so big firms can act with small-firm focus, and small firms with big-firm capacity. We are driven to see this done well.

How did your experience across both startups and regulated financial institutions shape the founding vision for Rational Exponent, and influence the early design choices that positioned risk and compliance as strategic drivers rather than just automated workflows?  

My background has taught me that speed without prudence isn’t innovation, it’s just unpriced risk. As Walter Bagehot put it: “Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.” So, we designed Rational Exponent to treat risk and compliance as strategic infrastructure for trust, not a back-office workflow to be automated.

As you moved from concept to product, how did you validate that banks were ready for a platform that challenges long-held assumptions about compliance being a cost center? 

We validated the opportunity the old-fashioned way: staying close to customers and listening hard. Our team has enough scar tissue from inside banks to recognize what breaks, why it breaks, and who carries the accountability when it does. Banks want something better, provided it respects the realities of regulation, audit, and operational risk.

At the founding stage, what did you see in the banking industry’s operational risk landscape that convinced you the timing was right for a platform like re:agent? 

The timing was right because AI at last makes it possible to mobilize information that has been trapped in cumbersome processes for decades. At the same time, banks face an unavoidable push to innovate as products, channels, and third-party dependencies become more complex. Those two forces together made “later” feel like the risky option.

How did your team approach building an enterprise-grade AI system that meets regulatory expectations from day one while still enabling rapid product creation for banks? 

We built re:agent with two disciplines at once: startup delivery cadence and a lifetime insider’s respect for how prudence actually works. That means controls, evidence, and approval flows are part of the product from day one; not a wrapper bolted on later. We move fast, but we don’t tolerate sloppiness in thinking or delivery.

What were the biggest technical or cultural blockers you anticipated when founding the company, and how did those shape your earliest product decisions? 

Technically, the hard problem is turning probabilistic AI into enterprise-grade systems that fail safely and can be governed. Culturally, the blocker is understandable: risk and compliance processes are the way they are because people got burned. Our earliest product decisions were about honoring that history while making the workflow cleaner, faster, and more reliable.

re:agent is positioned as an enterprise AI platform that helps banks design compliant, approval-ready products far more quickly—what principles guided how you built its interpretability, approval flow, and traceability so institutions can trust it from day one? 

Three principles guide how we work. First, we’re here for durable change, not regulatory-arbitrage theater, so we take the “not because it is easy, but because it is hard” (JFK, 1962) mindset seriously. Second, we preserve human accountability by design: “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision,” (IBM, 1979). Third, we bias toward “radical truth and radical transparency” (Ray Dalio, pretty much every day) so recommendations are traceable, contestable, and grounded in evidence.

As CTO and co-founder, how do you balance long-term architectural decisions with the realities of building for a compliance-heavy, risk-sensitive market? 

With difficulty, and by being disciplined about what we won’t trade away. We keep a tight loop with customers and lead with empathy for the constraints they live under. Architecture only matters if it survives contact with regulators, auditors, and the messy realities of operations.

Now that Rational Exponent has come out of stealth, what signals from banks reinforce your original thesis about AI turning compliance from a cost burden into a driver of business growth? 

The strongest signal is when teams start treating compliance as a way to grow faster with confidence, not just to slow down safely. Banks are being pulled toward faster change and pushed toward tighter control at the same time. In that world, turning rules into usable guardrails becomes a growth lever.

Looking ahead, what do you believe the industry will look like in the next few years if your founding vision for compliance-driven growth takes hold across major financial institutions? 

Near term, risk, operations, and product teams will spend less time chasing documents and more time making good decisions, and they’ll be prouder of the quality. Longer term, the aim is to prove James Grant (1992) false; he observed that “Progress is cumulative in science and engineering, but cyclical in finance.”

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Rational Exponent.