Ben Mason

24 November 2020

2020 has been a tumultuous year, with the pandemic affecting all our daily lives and especially how we work day-to-day. If you would have asked me back in January whether it would be possible to launch a new company, develop a new state of the art compliance management technology platform, and engage new clients whilst we all work remotely, then I would said it would be nigh on impossible – and you might be mad to try it. But that’s exactly what we’ve done!

I am so proud of our team. And importantly want to thank all the clients that have been part of the Steering Group, engaged in early system demonstrations and pilots and have helped us get this far. Welcome to My Compliance Centre, an integrated, compliance management platform that has all the tools a firm regulated for financial services needs to manage its regulatory obligations. 

But how did we get to this point? Well back in 2004 Iain Stephen and I set up Compliancy Services to offer e-learning and competence assessment to the insurance sector. Times moved on, Compliancy Services grew and those services quickly become a full suite of compliance support services and extended to other regtech solutions (for which they won awards). They now serve clients across sectors that include capital markets, banking, mortgage, payments and credit and today provide more than 600 regulated firms with ongoing compliance support. 

The best thing was the people we worked with. Many brilliant entrepreneurs starting their businesses. We got the chance to partner them as they grew – and we got to see how the complexity of regulation makes life difficult for regulated firms and their compliance departments.

Too often management react to regulatory changes or do not have sufficiently strong management information. They struggle to understand what compliance teams do or if they have the real risks covered. Small firms struggle with the cost of compliance. Medium firms find complexity in the range of issues to manage with limited resources. Larger firms add people but are not always able to resolve complexity. In amongst all of that, a myriad of Excel worksheets creates challenging management, control and reporting processes. Something has to give.

So, we looked at the market for compliance management tools. Despite a huge proliferation of specialist applications for issues such as AML, transaction monitoring and regulatory reporting, the quality of generalist compliance management systems in the market is surprisingly limited. Most have a specific focus but simply don’t address the full range of operational issues compliance managers face. Some have a very American orientation. Others simply are not modern software applications, with the user experience and features you might expect. The complexity of regulation has moved on significantly quicker than the supporting technology.

We decided to fix the problem and develop our own compliance management platform. To do real justice to the problem we needed to focus – to really focus. So, we formed a new company and brand, My Compliance Centre. I relinquished my CEO role with Compliancy Services to become Chairman, so that I could focus on building this new brand.

My Compliance Centre is for firms that recognise the contradiction of a non-automated compliance function in a complex regulatory world. It is a compliance management platform with a wide array of functions closely mirroring the activities of a compliance department: automation of routine stuff – like compliance monitoring and compliance registers; automation of painful and time-consuming activities – like regulatory change management and monitoring internal compliance advice. And much more. Built using standard Microsoft technology, hosted in the cloud to all expected security standards and with a modern user interface, My Compliance Centre takes financial services compliance management to the next level.

To ensure we really hit the mark we setup a Steering Group. This was formed from the compliance heads of banks, capital markets firms, fintechs, insurance companies and lenders. Each steering group member has a different take on the same problem. The richness of the feedback we have received from our steering group has helped us to develop a far more sophisticated and comprehensive platform than we ever could do on our own. We are immensely grateful for the deep insight that our Steering Group has given us, insight that only a group of seasoned practitioners would know.

All of this effort has led to the launch of My Compliance Centre. Please do take a look at around the website and do get in touch for a demonstration. We’d love to show you how My Compliance Centre could help your firm.