Case Study – ADG Corporate

7 March 2023

“We wanted a system, with wide ranging functionality to support our diverse activities and My Compliance Centre has the widest range of functions in the market. It was also important that we could implement different compliance frameworks for each group company, according to their risk profile, while maintaining a helicopter view of the entire group.” 

Bernard Mukwaira, Group Head of Compliance, ADG Corporate

ADG Corporate is a modern financial services group, based out of London with offices internationally and with over 15 years trading history. With interests in market making, brokerage, asset management, venture capital, private equity and offering its own funding platform, ADG is a truly diverse and innovative group, based on innovative technology and entrepreneurialism.

The breadth of ADG’s business model offers a very specific set of challenges to the compliance team.

Bernard Mukwaira, Group Head of Compliance explains, “it is the role of the compliance function to safely facilitate the ongoing development of the group and to support the entrepreneurial spirit that ADG was founded on, but also to recognise that each group company has its own specific regulatory risks and challenges and ensure our compliance framework reflects those. Given the diversity of the group, we need to be highly agile as a compliance team.”

Bernard Mukwaira and Carl Williams were brought into the group in early 2022 to lead the compliance function and develop a compliance framework that would support the group through the next phase of its growth.

“There were several challenges we needed to address”, stated Bernard. “Firstly, we needed a team both with the breadth of skills to support the wider group and the dynamism to support individual business units appropriately for their challenges. We also needed technology support that would allow our team to be efficient, and to use the compliance skills they have rather than spending all day administering spreadsheets when they should have been adding value to the company. We realised that implementing the right compliance management system was a high priority if we were to be effective as a compliance function.”

ADG searched the market and selected My Compliance Centre as their platform, of choice. “We wanted a system, with wide ranging functionality to support our diverse activities and My Compliance Centre has the widest range of functions in the market. It was also important that we could implement different compliance frameworks for each group company, according to their risk profile, while maintaining a helicopter view of the entire group.”

ADG were able to implement My Compliance Centre within 6 weeks.

“The support of the My Compliance Centre team was very helpful to get up and running, but we also took responsibility for building our own skills so we are in control of our own processes and daily activities. We are able to control employee attestations, process PA Dealing requests, we centralise all of the compliance teams task management in one place, manage all exceptions and breaches and generally control our daily processing through one system. It is also important for us that colleagues across the business find the system easy to use on the occasions that they have compliance tasks to carry out.”

“A final thought for us was that My Compliance Centre has a powerful future vision. Compliance and risk are not standing still, but we know that My Compliance Centre will continue to grow with the business.”