As compliance consultants everywhere will attest, demonstrating value to clients is a never-ending endeavour. Your mettle is being tested every day, with customers demanding deeper insights, original thinking and tangible results – all at lightning speed, and for less. There’s also the challenge of competition from peers, many of whom will be striving to stay abreast of the latest compliance innovations.

Recently, we hosted a webinar for the Association of Professional Compliance Consultants (APCC) to tackle these precise challenges. During the session we learned how RegTech has become one of the primary ways modern consultancies are proving their worth, protecting margins and driving growth.

Whether you missed the session or want a recap, here is how leading firms are using RegTech to better support their clients.

The experts behind the discussion

The session was led by two industry veterans with decades of experience in both compliance and consultancy:

Ben Mason, Founder of My Compliance Centre. A regulatory entrepreneur and former Chairman of Compliancy Services (now Cosegic), Ben has spent over 20 years advising financial institutions. He built My Compliance Centre specifically to address the challenges he saw firms facing first-hand, and understands the realities of launching and growing a startup.

Caroline Gill, Founder of Out of The Box Consulting. With over 30 years in wealth management and previous experience as a director of the APCC, Caroline brings a practical, hands-on perspective. As a user of My Compliance Centre for over four years, she understands exactly how tech support translates into real-world benefits for both consultants and regulated firms.

Cutting through the jargon: an accessible discussion about technology

While RegTech is now a multi-billion pound global market, most platforms seek to tackle a single issue, typically around financial crime.

However, the key area of this webinar’s focus was that segment of the market known as compliance management systems (CMS). These enable regulated firms to meet their compliance obligations accurately and efficiently using integrated systems with many compliance functions.

A significant number of larger compliance consultancies have built their own systems for a number of reasons, including: their app-based simplicity and intuitiveness; the ability to generate additional recurring revenue; the way they streamline client delivery processes; and their management information capabilities.

When taken together these attributes help consultancies position themselves as a valued, insights-rich partner rather than a cost centre.

Why reinvent the wheel?

When entering the CMS landscape for the first time, many consultancies will face the “build versus buy” dilemma. Building a bespoke system, with a high quality modern interface, maintainable code, sufficiently high-quality functions and meeting evolving security requirements requires becoming a software business – a costly, high-maintenance distraction from your core service.

However, configurable platforms like My Compliance Centre are designed to let consultancies bypass development headaches, and offer an agile solution that allows you to subscribe clients to the exact services they need. This approach is underpinned by modularity and encompasses:

• Compliance operations: Managing the daily rhythm of compliance, from registers and regulatory change to monitoring and file checking.
• Governance: Tools supporting SMCR and the delivery of an effective governance structure , boards, committees and conflicts of interest.
• Employee compliance: Handling employee policy attestations, gifts and hospitality, conflicts, outside business interests and personal account dealing

By centralising these functions, consultants can replace disjointed spreadsheets and manual processes with a more robust, defensive strategy for their clients and offer integrated MI and insights as part of their service.

Flexible positioning for your business model

Another key takeaway from the webinar was that technology should support your business model, not dictate it. On this, My Compliance Centre can be positioned in two distinct ways – depending on your client base.

Firstly, it’s an integral service platform. This means for smaller firms, the system can be presented as the consultancy’s own platform – a core part of the service you deliver.

Secondly, it’s an oversight tool. For larger firms capable of selecting their own platforms, it acts as their internal compliance system, to which you (as their supporting consultant) have access for monitoring and assurance purposes.

In both scenarios, the result is the same: better management information, streamlined workflows and a stronger relationship between consultant and client.

Taking the next step

Technology is now a clear differentiator in the compliance consulting market. If you are looking to modernise your client delivery or simply want to explore how a CMS could fit into your current offering, we would love to continue the conversation.

Get in touch with Ben Mason directly at ben.mason@mycompliancecentre.com to discuss exclusive deals for consultancy partners or to arrange a demonstration of the platform.

If you would like more insight on how compliance consulting is evolving, including regulatory trends, practical guidance and perspectives from across the industry, you can sign up to Periscope, My Compliance Centre’s newsletter. It’s designed for senior compliance professionals and consultants who want to stay close to regulatory thinking and real world practice.