“I think that … regulatory enforcement [is] predicated on the assumption that all financial services licensees have incredible tech that helps them deal with all this stuff. And the reality, most of them don’t.”
— Deputy CRO, Head of Compliance & Regulatory Risk “State of Financial Services Breach Reporting in Australia”, Gadens/Core Data 2022
A quick aside
As a Senior Compliance Consultant and the Product Manager for OpenAFSL, I face a daily challenge of trying to help licensees understand ASIC’s expectations of Licensees’ technological capacities and address the (unspoken) assumption around my motivations.
It’s sometimes difficult for licensees to understand that the empire of Excel sheets and Access databases has fallen and they no longer provide the level of protection they once (but really never) did.
That’s why the Gadens/Coredata report – The State of Financial Services Breach Reporting in Australia – is such a compelling resource.
If you haven’t read it, you should.
Although we prefer our data to theirs, the report presents an industry struggling for clarity, burdened by increased compliance burdens and valiantly struggling with inadequate resourcing and even-more inadequate systems.
We might suggest it’s a more bleak view than that of our clients, but our clients have OpenAFSL to do most of the heavy lifting.
If you’ve ever wondered whether Licensees really need regtech, the answer is a resounding yes.
If you’ve ever wondered whether an integrated compliance solution like OpenAFSL can help you, the answer is an even more resounding yes.
If you want to ensure the sustainability of your advice business, reach out to me and see how our regtech solution can help you.
Onward, ever upward
“The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible”
— Arthur C Clarke
Financial services compliance is many things, but never boring.
If you’re a Licensee, Responsible Manager or Compliance Manager you live in the constantly evolving environment and operate in a state of flux. It’s inconceivable that anyone, could consistently and confidently, comply with current legal requirements while simultaneously addressing, interpreting and implementing new requirements.
Regardless of our optimism for the future, we’ll continue to enjoy a host of new challenges to our compliance and regulatory risk management arrangements. Our capacity to influence those changes may be minimal, but we have to have an untapped capacity to embrace them as opportunities.
My role is to ensure that we can deliver a compliance platform that help our clients confidently manage their obligations, streamline their business processes and optimise their resources. My motivation is to provide our clients with market-leading regulatory technology that can help address key challenges and avoid the expense and bother of upgrading legacy systems and processes.
There’s a lot going on but I’d like to share some exciting news about OpenAFSL.
Exciting news
“When you take technology and mix it with art, you always come up with something innovative. ”
— Robert Rodriguez
We understand the impact of compliance: our Development Team has grown both rapidly and significantly to ensure that OpenAFSL continues to deliver on its promise to free you from the burden of compliance. Even as we expand into other jurisdictions, our global and forward-facing perspective provides the innovations and efficiencies Licensees need.
What’s new
Since these updates seem to be read more closely by our competitors than our clients, I need to be a little less direct than usual. While we’re flattered by the attention, the more profound enhancements we’ve launched will only be shared with our users. That said, we are happy to confirm that:
- The seamless integration of ‘incident reporting’, ‘complaints’ and ‘breach reporting’ provides for the consistent classification of issues, the automatic flagging of ‘deemed significant’ issues and time-sensitive notifications of reportable situations to relevant stakeholders. We’ve also made it even easier to track an incident or reportable issue back to the initiating event. (Believe me, that’s more impressive than it sounds)
- The Analytics module provides customisable trend analysis (including systemic and recurring issues) for incidents, complaints and reportable situations.
- The Complaints module aggregates and records (from multiple sources) rich, interrogable data for every stage of the complaint process (with time-sensitive notifications to relevant stakeholders).
- The enhanced Complaint data report exports all data in the form presented in the ASIC Data Dictionary.
- Navigation between modules have been improved to provide frictionless leaps between dashboards.
- The Curse of Gates has been lifted. Information from Microsoft Office Applications can now be copied and pasted into the relevant registers without any intervening steps.
Your call to action
Not every Licensee needs to embrace regulatory technology; it’s really only necessary for those that want to remain in business. If your business plan is premised on the immediate sale of your licensee, then contact Assured Support and we can introduce you to potential purchasers. But if you want to build a profitable, and sustainable, advice business then start to consider how regulatory technology can help you.
The right regulatory technology can deliver benefits that far exceed its cost. If you’d like to learn how, please reach out to me.
