Find out more about how ComplyPortal’s Approvals module can make your firms approval processes more efficient and compliant.

All organisations must manage and control approval processes efficiently to avoid becoming a bottleneck in daily operations. Time is money and juggling multiple approval requests with the added challenge of remote work environments is no mean feat. With the tightening and introducing of new regulations, such as the FCA’s new Approval Gateway for Financial Promotions, and with the new Consumer Duty now in full effect for regulated firms, having a transparent and simple approval process with a full audit trail is now vital. Tracking approvals through traditional methods like email is increasingly difficult or even impossible given the volume and complexity of business needs today.

Read on for more information about how our software makes managing and reporting Approvals much easier.

Who is it for: All staff required to submit for approval, compliance officers and senior management responsible for granting approvals.

Key features:

• Ready-to-use registers for Gifts and Inducements, Incident Reports, Personal Account Dealing, Conflict Checks, Broker Onboarding, and Financial Promotions
• Route requests to defined individuals or groups for approval
• Easily fit to bespoke workflow for multiple approval levels
• Notifications and alerts to make sure approval requests are reviewed and signed off efficiently
• Robust audit trail for ease of demonstrating compliance
• Option to add bespoke registers specific to your organisation’s needs
• Straightforward layout and operation for ease of use

How it benefits you:

Keeping accurate, easily accessible, and organised records of transaction approvals is an important element of compliance management. This not only creates clear audit trails for the regulator, but also helps keep your internal operations running smoothly by promoting transparency and ease of access within your own organisation. Making compliance concepts and processes more understandable and accessible helps to create a culture of compliance throughout your whole organisation.

The Compliance Perspective:

Regulations and good corporate governance require personnel to seek approval for various actions from Compliance or other senior people.

Regulators will check whether the approval request is clear, what time it was submitted, by whom, what was requested, who approved it and why, whether any changes were required and the time of approval. Therefore, making sure that you have clear records of approvals, and any declinatures, is crucial.

“Recording such information on paper or elsewhere is prone to errors. As such, having a dedicated tool to assist with meeting regulatory expectations is a powerful resource for regulated firms.” – Simon Chapman, Director at Complyport

Find out more about our Monitoring module and the rest of the ComplyPortal platform at: https://complyportal.uk/modules

About ComplyPortal – Compliance software since 2011:

First developed in 2011 by compliance professionals for compliance officers, ComplyPortal offers workflow, automation, and several modules to help firms with control and regulatory compliance monitoring.

ComplyPortal simplifies financial services regulatory compliance management on an easy-to-use cloud-based comprehensive compliance platform. It enables compliance officers, risk officers and senior management to keep track of their firm’s regulatory responsibilities and workflows. Our platform includes the following modules, among others:

• Monitoring: a year-round schedule pre-populated with monitoring questionnaires to ease compliance processes.
• Registers: lists controlled by the Compliance officer, but easy for staff to view.
• Risk: map and control risk areas to effectively identify and manage risk for your firm.
• Training: access our LMS platform for all Compliance and Governance Training

CLICK HERE TO GET STARTED!

In the constantly evolving landscape of compliance requirements, businesses face an ever-increasing challenge to keep up with the intricate web of regulations. Staying abreast of these changes and demonstrating preparedness can often become a daunting task, consuming valuable time and resources. Fortunately, ComplyPortal stands as a beacon of relief for compliance management.

ComplyPortal doesn’t just simplify compliance; it transforms the way businesses approach it. Our suite of modules are designed to address various facets of compliance. ComplyPortal becomes a vital tool for organisations navigating the complex regulatory terrain. Here are five reasons why ComplyPortal is the chosen compliance tool for our clients:

1. Automated Monitoring Questionnaires: Our platform digitises your compliance monitoring questionnaires to act as intuitive guides, ensuring that you effectively record and monitor compliance metrics. Say goodbye to the complexities of manual tracking and effortlessly stay ahead of compliance obligations.
2. Seamless Workflows and Registers: ComplyPortal streamlines approval processes, audits, and common tasks such as Financial Promotions approvals, PA dealing and gift management with its seamless workflows and registers. By centralising these functions, the platform provides a holistic approach to compliance management, increased oversight over risk, and a full reportable audit trail.
3. Permission-Based Access: Security is paramount. The platform offers permission-based access, ensuring that your registers are secure yet easily accessible. Whether it’s maintaining trading blacklists, supplier lists, or any other crucial data, ComplyPortal has you covered.
4. Automated Reminders: No more chasing after attestations and follow-ups. ComplyPortal takes care of it for you with automated reminders. This feature not only simplifies the compliance process but also allows you to generate detailed reports effortlessly with just a click, providing a comprehensive overview of your compliance landscape.
5. Record-Keeping: Keeping track of the latest document versions is crucial for compliance. ComplyPortal automates record-keeping, making audits a breeze. Ensure that your staff always uses the most up-to-date versions, reducing the risk of non-compliance due to outdated information.

Find out more about ComplyPortal’s suite of modules: https://complyportal.uk/modules

ComplyPortal is not just a software solution; it’s a strategic partner that empowers your business to navigate compliance requirements efficiently, allowing you to refocus on your core operations. If you’re ready to elevate your compliance, take the first step by booking a demo with ComplyPortal today.

Let us guide you through a transformative journey towards streamlined compliance management.

CLICK HERE TO GET STARTED!

About ComplyPortal – Compliance software since 2011:

First developed in 2011 by compliance professionals for compliance officers, ComplyPortal offers workflow, automation, and several modules to help firms with control and regulatory compliance monitoring.

ComplyPortal simplifies financial services regulatory compliance management on an easy-to-use cloud-based comprehensive compliance platform. It enables compliance officers, risk officers and senior management to keep track of their firm’s regulatory responsibilities and workflows. Our platform includes the following modules, among others:

• Monitoring: a year-round schedule pre-populated with monitoring questionnaires to ease compliance processes.
• Registers: lists controlled by the Compliance officer, but easy for staff to view.
• Risk: map and control risk areas to effectively identify and manage risk for your firm.
• Training: access our LMS platform for all Compliance and Governance Training

What recent results from the European Banking

Authority and ESMA reports show

The European Banking Authority (EBA) has recently published an analysis looking into the RegTech landscape in the EU. The report assesses the many benefits, challenges and risks of the use of RegTech in the EU and lays out the steps to be taken to support the sound adoption and scale-up of solutions in this sector. The study also proposes actions designed to enhance the knowledge and skills of the competent authorities (CAs).

ESMA has also published a report on Trends, Risks and Vulnerabilities of the Financial sector dedicating a part on RegTech and SupTech and the change for Markets and authorities. This report highlights that market participants are increasingly using new automated tools in a variety of areas, while potential applications of new tools for regulators include greater surveillance capacity and improved data collection and management.

When technology is used for compliance, it is called Regulatory Technology or ‘RegTech’. Regtech is defined as any range of applications of technology‐enabled innovation for regulatory, compliance and reporting requirements implemented by a regulated institution – with or without the assistance of RegTech provider.

RegTech solutions in Financial Institutions (FIs) and Investment Firms (FI’s) are currently evident in:

• Anti-Money-Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) – for example, providing solutions for sanction screening or remote onboarding of customers.
• Fraud prevention – through automated behaviour and transaction monitoring.
• Prudential reporting – supporting institutions in their regulatory submissions.
• ICT security – providing detection mechanisms for an institution’s operations security.
• Creditworthiness assessments – providing new capabilities for assessing the creditworthiness of clients.
• Regulatory Reporting – supporting institutions in their trade reporting.
• Risk Management

Benefits

According to financial organisations using RegTech solutions, their key benefits are improved risk management, better monitoring and sample capabilities, and a reduction in human error. At the same time, RegTech providers place heavy emphasis on their ability to increase efficiency and effectiveness and quell the impact of ongoing regulatory change.

Some of the increasing disparities in perspective between financial institutions (FIs) and RegTech providers suggest that further research of the benefits afforded by RegTech solutions is required.

ESMA also believes that the move towards a more data-driven and pro-active approach will enhance monitoring of the financial sector and help ensure better outcomes for market participants and consumers. The continual push for efficiencies and cost savings, particularly for back-end and legacy systems as well as for labour-intensive processes will increase the use of RegTech in the foreseeable future.

Risks

EBA highlighted that when not implemented correctly, RegTech solutions may also generate risks for FIs that would need to be identified, monitored and managed. These risks may relate to, for example, compliance, concentration, business continuity, ICT and security, reputational issues, internal governance, conduct and consumer protection, and/or technology.

RegTech may also create new risks for CAs supervising FIs. These include potential difficulties in assessing the effectiveness and reliability of the technological solutions used by FIs, and a potential lack of skills and tools needed to supervise the use of technology enabled RegTech solutions and, say, audit the underlying algorithms.

ESMA focused on the risks and challenges for regulators and market participants in the areas of data collection and management, digital transition and failure on the part of market participants to adapt to the new digitalised infrastructure and the need from regulators to invest in the technological tools and human skills that will allow them to effectively analyse the results, operational risks and the risks from strategic incentives such as developing expertise in RegTech.

Challenges

The EBA report suggests that the majority of challenges to RegTech market development involve internal factors within the FIs and providers. Likewise, ESMA considers most of those challenges to apply for FIs. However, a lack of common regulatory standards across the EU could also constitute a barrier to the wider market adoption of RegTech solutions.

The main challenges from the FI perspective are summarısed as follows:

• Data-related challenges and cybersecurity threats: FIs often indicate data quality, data privacy and protection, lack of data integration, data availability, and lack of data standardisation and harmonisation as issues.
• Interoperability and integration with the existing legacy systems: FI legacy systems and processes have too many silos, making RegTech adoption difficult, and this is further compounded by doubts about the ICT capacity of FIs to support FinTech, RegTech, and InsurTech solutions.
• Changes to regulation: changes with national or international regulations and other regulatory challenges can be another key barrier to RegTech adoption.
• Costs and procurement process: RegTech solutions seen as part of compliance and usually treated as a back‐office function may be at risk of underinvestment.
• Lack of necessary skills and training: when working with either in‐house or external RegTech solutions, FIs need specialists, e.g. data scientists and engineers, to be able, where relevant, to scout, assess, operate, and maintain updated RegTech solutions.
• Perceived immaturity of RegTech providers’ solutions: FIs that see RegTech as a potential competitive advantage often cite the lack of available and mature RegTech solutions as a challenge.

Challenges from the RegTech provider perspective include:

• Lack of technological capabilities – the lack of some clients API capabilities and lack of standardisation are perceived as obstacles for technical integration.
• Security, data privacy and protection issues – privacy regulation may be one of the key constrains for FIs from sharing datasets with RegTech providers.
• Changes of national and international regulation – complex and continuously evolving regulatory landscape is perceived as a challenge, in particular on prudential reporting, fraud prevention and AML/CFT.
• Cost of user acquisition – a challenge, especially for recently established and smaller RegTech providers.
• Lack of FI understanding of RegTech solutions –it appears to RegTech providers that FIs may not be fully aware of all advantages that RegTech solutions may bring.
• Lack of harmonised legal and regulatory requirements – RegTech providers perceive the lack of harmonisation of regulatory requirements across the EU and the lack of regulatory data standards to be obstacles for wider market adoption of RegTech solutions.
• Clarity of regulatory/supervisory guidance – RegTech providers consider the lack of regulatory/supervisory guidance and support can be an obstacle preventing the roll‐out of their solutions across different countries.
• Competition with other solutions – a high level of industry competition with other solutions, detailed in segments where RegTech providers offer comparable solutions.

What’s needed to better adopt & scale up RegTech solutions

The EBA proposes several steps to support the adoption and scaling up of RegTech solutions. These include boosting RegTech knowledge, addressing the skill gaps among regulators and supervisors, supporting the convergence of supervisory practices, providing clarity on market expectations, and harmonising the legal and regulatory requirements.

For more insight on compliance technology options and benefits, visit https://complyportal.uk/modules/ and find out how our straightforward, comprehensive compliance technology solution can help you and your organisation.

About ComplyPortal:

First developed in 2011 by compliance professionals for compliance officers, ComplyPortal offers workflow, automation, and several modules to help firms with control and regulatory compliance monitoring.

ComplyPortal simplifies financial services regulatory compliance management on an easy-to-use cloud-based comprehensive compliance platform. It enables compliance officers, risk officers and senior management to keep track of their firm’s regulatory responsibilities and workflows. Our platform includes the following modules, among others:

• Monitoring: a year-round schedule pre-populated with monitoring questionnaires to ease compliance processes.
• Registers: lists controlled by the Compliance officer, but easy for staff to view.
• Risk: map and control risk areas to effectively identify and manage risk for your firm.
• eKYC solution: perform comprehensive searches, including client identity verification, document authenticity, and more for a comprehensive KYC and AML approach

CLICK HERE TO GET STARTED!

Can corporate governance and the culture of financial services firms keep up with the pace of growth of regulatory technology?

During the past several years, regulators have invested heavily in technology to protect and monitor regulatory reporting data quality. The main challenges for 2021 will focus on new regulations, preparing for those with effective dates this year and those that are going through the legislation, proposal and comment processes. This leaves financial services firms with no option but to address automated reporting as a way of validating all data submitted to regulators, detecting and correcting data issues as they arise, and setting up an overall data governance framework across different regulatory reporting requirements. Thus, Regulatory Technology (RegTech) is crucial for operational management and strategic decision-making for both the risk and compliance functions as it is designed to help firms understand and meet legal requirements more effectively and efficiently.

According to Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence’s 2020 annual survey report “RegTech and the role of compliance in 2021”, despite firms facing several budget challenges during the pandemic, the adoption and implementation of regulatory technology has taken a huge step forward with 70% of the surveyed firms reporting that COVID-19 increased their reliance on technological solutions.

The study, which shares the experiences of more than 400 compliance and risk practitioners, found that this sector’s growth is expected to accelerate in the coming months and years. Firms and their customers are realising the great value of adopting a wide variety of Fintech solutions.

The survey also shows that firms must be careful to deploy solutions on solid foundations. This means getting corporate governance right. A quarter of respondents said that corporate boards and the risk and compliance functions need to be more involved in finding and adopting Fintech solutions for the firm, highlighting the absence of appropriate skill sets as one reason for this lack of involvement.

Moreover, RegTech applications continue to provide popular, embedded solutions for firms in areas such as compliance monitoring, financial crime, AML/CTF, sanctions and regulatory reporting. Budgets are predicted to increase with a mix of in-house and external solutions as the option most frequently selected by respondents.

Interestingly, just 16% of firms reported they had implemented RegTech solutions, with a further 34% stating that RegTech solutions were affecting the management of compliance. Notably, the report identifies a shift from build to buy; firms that employ inhouse solutions fell to 6% in 2020 from 17% in 2019, while 12% reported that all of their RegTech solutions were developed externally.

For more insight on compliance technology options and benefits, visit https://complyportal.uk/modules/ and find out how our straightforward, comprehensive compliance technology solution can help you and your organisation.

About ComplyPortal:

First developed in 2011 by compliance professionals for compliance officers, ComplyPortal offers workflow, automation, and several modules to help firms with control and regulatory compliance monitoring.

ComplyPortal simplifies financial services regulatory compliance management on an easy-to-use cloud-based comprehensive compliance platform. It enables compliance officers, risk officers and senior management to keep track of their firm’s regulatory responsibilities and workflows. Our platform includes the following modules, among others:

• Monitoring: a year-round schedule pre-populated with monitoring questionnaires to ease compliance processes.
• Registers: lists controlled by the Compliance officer, but easy for staff to view.
• Risk: map and control risk areas to effectively identify and manage risk for your firm.
• eKYC solution: perform comprehensive searches, including client identity verification, document authenticity, and more for a comprehensive KYC and AML approach

CLICK HERE TO GET STARTED!

Technology may help with optimising work, but compliance professionals are just as important as ever

It is no secret that ‘going digital’ has been the trajectory for financial services for some time – even before the Covid-19 pandemic sped up the digitalisation process. The fourth industrial revolution has seen many industries turn to technology to gain efficiencies and seek greater digital transformations in their business – whether that be software that can carry out tasks once completed by humans, or digital methods of managing work. At ComplyPortal we know just how useful regtech and other compliance management software can be, but we believe technology is becoming more and more necessary to help compliance professionals do their day-to-day jobs.

The Appeal of Compliance Technology

Regulatory and compliance management technologies have been developed to provide solutions for compliance professionals. Regtech specifically exists to provide digital ways of fulfilling compliance obligations – for example, improved record-keeping to demonstrate compliance to the regulator, or detailed analysis and monitoring to minimise enterprise-wide risk. Compliance management technology supports organisations by offering more efficient methods of task management or better access to important documents. What’s more, with many staff still working from home, or combining remote and office-based work, the ability to manage workflows and access data remotely continues to be a key benefit of compliance technology.

The Limitations of Software

While technology provides efficiency and ease, it cannot replace particular human skills. For example, consulting with colleagues or external clients requires skills in interpersonal engagement, communication, and complex problem-solving. People management, compliance education, and creating a culture of compliance within an organisation are all tasks which also require a human touch, although they may be supported by the use of technology.

Modern Compliance – The Hybrid Approach

The responsibilities and challenges of modern compliance demand a modern solution: combining the human and the digital. Compliance professionals juggle multiple responsibilities but dividing these into tasks that must be done manually and tasks that can be done digitally optimises the compliance process and culture in an organisation. Digitalising tasks or using regtech to fulfil compliance responsibilities can lead to being better able to demonstrate compliance to senior staff and the regulator and increase productivity by giving compliance teams more free time for tasks that require a particularly human touch.

How ComplyPortal Can Help

Visit https://complyportal.uk/modules/ to find out more about our straightforward, comprehensive compliance technology solutions. You can also book a software demo or talk to one of our expert advisors to discuss how our compliance technology can meet your and your organisation’s needs.

About ComplyPortal – Compliance software since 2011:

First developed in 2011 by compliance professionals for compliance officers, ComplyPortal offers workflow, automation, and several modules to help firms with control and regulatory compliance monitoring.

ComplyPortal simplifies financial services regulatory compliance management on an easy-to-use cloud-based comprehensive compliance platform. It enables compliance officers, risk officers and senior management to keep track of their firm’s regulatory responsibilities and workflows. Our platform includes the following modules, among others:

• Monitoring: a year-round schedule pre-populated with monitoring questionnaires to ease compliance processes.
• Registers: lists controlled by the Compliance officer, but easy for staff to view.
• Risk: map and control risk areas to effectively identify and manage risk for your firm.
• eKYC system: perform comprehensive searches, including client identity verification, document authenticity, and more for a comprehensive KYC and AML approach

CLICK HERE TO GET STARTED!