The Situation
A Swiss fiduciary firm with eleven staff manages complete financial dossiers for 180 SME clients — tax filings, payroll records, annual accounts, and ongoing correspondence. The work is document-intensive by nature: every client relationship generates hundreds of files over the years, across multiple formats, going back decades.
Over 2025, several employees had started using a cloud-based AI assistant to draft client communications, summarize financial documents, and answer questions about specific client situations. Nobody had formally authorized it — it had simply become a habit.
The Trigger
In early 2026, the Swiss professional association for fiduciaries updated its conduct guidelines to explicitly address the use of AI tools. The directive was clear: members must ensure that client data is not processed by third-party systems without a documented data processing agreement and explicit client consent.
An internal review revealed that the informal cloud AI usage had not met these requirements. Client data had been processed outside the firm's own infrastructure — and the firm had no way to document exactly where it had gone or how it had been handled.
The managing partner made the decision quickly: a private AI solution had to be in place before the next client audit.
The Challenges
No IT Department
The firm had no in-house technical staff. Any solution had to be deployable and maintainable without dedicated IT resources.
Mixed Document Formats
Client dossiers contained PDFs, Excel files, ABACUS accounting exports, scanned letters, and legacy files going back decades.
No Room for Disruption
The team couldn't absorb a months-long implementation project. The solution had to be operational quickly and require zero retraining.
The Solution
KADARAG was deployed on a single server already present in the firm's office. The full document corpus — 180 client dossiers, approximately 14,000 files — was indexed over a weekend.
Staff now access the system through a simple chat interface, asking questions like "What was the depreciation basis for client X's machinery in 2023?" or "Which clients still have open tax objections?" — and receiving answers sourced directly from the actual documents, with full file references.
Client dossiers are separated by access controls. Each employee sees only the clients they are responsible for.
The Results
"We don't have an IT department. We needed something that just works — not a six-month infrastructure project. KADARAG was running in three weeks, and the whole team was using it without a single training session."
— Managing Partner, Swiss Fiduciary Firm