SOC 2 & Compliance Audit
Compliance platforms already collect the evidence by API — the audit firm is now the last manual node in an automated chain, and the license it holds is the moat everyone else is building toward.
The purest automation economics in professional services: the inputs arrive structured, the output is standardized, and the scarce asset — the signing credential — cannot be automated at all.
Industry research
The economics
FIGURES FROM THE FIRM’S PUBLISHED RESEARCH · SOURCES ON REQUEST · THE 2× PLAYBOOK
Growth opportunities
Where the 2× lives
Evidence-pipeline automation
Intake, testing, and workpaper assembly carried by systems against the platforms’ structured exports — auditors reviewing exceptions, not collecting screenshots.
Fixed-fee productization
Standardized scope sold at standardized price, with delivery cost falling underneath it — the margin expansion the hourly model would have refunded to clients.
Capacity release as growth
The constraint is credentialed reviewers; each hour released is sellable at full rate in a market with a structural auditor shortage.
Our perspective
What most firms get wrong
The wrong competitor
Audit firms read the compliance platforms as a threat. They are the opposite: an industry that standardized its own inputs is an industry that pre-paid for the audit firm’s automation — the last manual node captures the spread.
Where we’d start
One engagement decomposed against its platform exports: every audit hour mapped to evidence type, the automatable share priced, and reviewer leverage modeled — audits per credential, before and after.
Put it to us