Product Management
If you consider “compliance” difficult, spare a moment to consider the challenges inherent in being the Product Manager for what I consider to be Australia’s best compliance system, OpenAFSL.
The challenge is less about regulatory change, than managing user expectations and preferences. As more clients engage with the platform, supporting those users and managing the speed of innovation requires more of my attention. Thankfully, starting well-ahead and having an exceptional development team lessens the impact, but we’re so hooked on continuous improvement that we’re constantly busy.
If you’ve ever wondered if now is the best time to adopt OpenAFSL in your business, the answer is a resounding yes.
If you’ve ever wondered whether an integrated compliance solution will 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
“To infinity, and beyond”
— Buzz Lightyear
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
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, [Hi to the Guys on the line] I still need to be discrete about recent wins and planned innovations. That said, I’m happy to confirm that:
- We’ve streamlined the Risk and Obligations Register (the compliance calendar) to allow the answering of multiple attestations in one submission as well as changing the Obligations area to allow the modification of attestations based on the individual monitoring actions. We’ve also improved transparency by capturing linked attestations.
- We’ve introduced tutorial content introduced across all major modules in the app.
- Separate module for tracking approvals and exceptions across the business (this will, for example, will track marketing sign-off, template approvals and Product / Platform Approvals).
- Provision for multi-Kanban to be available to users which are allocated more than one board.
- Added a ‘move’ person function for admin that will allow a person to be moved along with their Reviews Actions and Remediation to the new business.
- When converting an incident from an Issue to a Breach, a list of statutory contraventions is provided to allow the user to identify prior to Breach creation.
- New Survey Analytics tool for viewing adviser post-review survey data (but this will work with all survey types).
- When exporting Complaint data to excel the text and ID are exported as defined in the ASIC Data Dictionary for Complaint reporting requirements.
- Fixes to Remediation, Issue and Complaint free text fields to handle copy and paste of unique characters from Microsoft Office Applications.
- Update to Kanban to show on the card if multiple members are present.
- Advice Summary field added to each review file to allow the Review team to add context to the file which will automatically compile and form the Review notes.
- Licensee Reviews now are made aware if they are in the top 30% of Reviews performed to better indicate their overall industry position.
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.
