Post Event Post: Adopt a Tactical, Strategic and Proactive Approach to Compliance

In early November myself and the team took part in the ‘Capture, Correlate, Analyse: Deriving value from electronic communications data’ event, which was held at Thompson Reuters in the heart of London’s trading center, Canary Wharf.

The theme we presented is that well-integrated technology is the key to not only maintaining strict compliance but also to deriving better insights from eComms and realizing greater ROI. This view undoubtedly rang true with my fellow speakers and the audience at the event.

Staggering figures suggest that by 2020 financial firms will be spending 20% of their running costs on meeting compliance. Unfortunately, manually conducted investigations are expensive, time- consuming and sometimes near-on impossible with the sheer volume of data required. Financial firms must also face the dilemma of finding the right compliance technology approach (including the fundamental question of ‘Build vs Buy?’), which must be adaptive to the specific needs.

A key theme at the event was the ongoing evolution of legislation on personal privacy, which ensures firms must protect staff just as much as customers and the company itself. However, despite this increased scrutiny, 20% of spending on compliance is simply too high and unsustainable. Firms must reduce these costs by employing the right solutions, breaking down silos, and ensuring the process is viewed as a benefit rather than a grudge cost.

As well as personally presenting to the audience, I was privileged to participate in a panel debate with a group of experts from across the trading industry. My fellow panel included: Tom Kennedy of Refinitiv (formerly the Financial and Risk business of Thomson Reuters), Mark Hollings of KPMG, Rachel Przybylski of Saxo Capital Markets, and Paul Burleton of Lysis Financial.

With an engaging conversation between the panel and the audience, we discussed the need for a holistic approach to dealing with eComms data that encompasses both compliance and business intelligence, whilst encompassing the whole organization. It’s clear that data must be captured once for all requirements, reducing costs and customer frustration.

We discussed the challenges of correlating unstructured data and the need to embrace Cloud hosted systems to meet future challenges. Other discussions included the need to understand the links between meeting compliance and addressing the needs of the customer and whether Real-Time reporting is essential or if relevant highlights are a better approach for a busy trading floor.

We concluded the event by discussing the biggest headaches in collecting and using this data. Essential suggestions included reliably capturing the relevant data, avoiding irritating customers by having different teams contact them separately, and the considerable costs and resources involved in running ad-hoc manual investigations.

The event highlighted that for many firms there are still significant challenges to overcome, but also that there are excellent automated solutions on the market. Undoubtedly every firm needs to understand the vital importance of its data, think strategically, and have a clear vision of what needs to be achieved. Only then can the business choose the right platform, from the right vendor, to achieve all its goals.

My presentation at the event: