Apiax at the Global RegTech Summit 2019: Country Manuals, Compliance, and Cross-Border Banking
We took the opportunity to present our digital compliance solution at the Global RegTech Summit 2019 — in fact, we were chosen to present by the delegates before the event, an honour that we were naturally pleased to accept. Here’s what we showed the audience.
Cross-border banking in the digital age
In our presentation, we focused on a simple use case, namely planning client interactions in a cross-border banking scenario. The legal and reputational risks associated with cross-border financial services have risen sharply in recent years, mainly because many countries have begun to enforce laws more strictly since the financial crisis. Banks, wealth managers, asset managers and other financial institutions that provide services and products across borders must comply with the regulations of the host country. Managing these risks today is costly and inefficient and often leads to inferior results.
With the right tools, financial institutions can turn the complexity of regulation into a competitive advantage.
What we showed the audience at the Global RegTech Summit 2019 is how financial institutions can replace traditional, paper-based country manuals with digital country manuals that are not only much more convenient to use, but also provide clear yes-or-no answers in even the most complicated settings. Digital country manuals make the task of cross-border compliance lean, easy and efficient again.
Benefits of digital country manuals
Imagine a simple scenario. A British client advisor travels to Singapore to meet a French client. This is already a daunting task. The client advisor needs to read at least 30 pages of country manuals before she goes and may need to raise queries with her compliance team as the manuals are ambiguous, or she may use her own judgment to interpret the restrictions.
Now, what if the meeting place is changed while the client advisor is in the air? While she is in the air, her client changes the venue to Australia. She lands in Singapore with no relevant manual and no compliance support as it is the middle of the night in the UK. This analogue experience means she may have to cancel the meeting and lose the business.
Working with digital country manuals completely changes this dynamic. Planning even the most complex client interactions takes fewer than two minutes. It only takes a few seconds to cope with changes to the interaction, such as our change in the meeting location. Digital country manuals provide clear yes-or-no answers at the touch of a button instead of ambiguous, general information, without any consultation with the in-house compliance experts. Ultimately, this enables the client advisor to do good business for her employer and empowers financial institutions to easily serve clients in different jurisdictions and among changing circumstances.
Compliance in the digital age
The regulatory certainty that our solution provides enables global growth initiatives and international expansion plans, making it the perfect partner for a wide range of financial institutions, including private banks, universal banks and challenger banks or FinTech startups.
Digital country manuals replace paper-based country manuals and deliver further benefits associated with digital transformation: improving boring, expensive and inefficient compliance training and transforming the role of the compliance team from a function that stops business from happening to one that can use its data to drive business strategies.
This is the message we wanted to convey to the audience at the Global RegTech Summit 2019: that the increasing complexity of regulation does not have to be a burden for financial institutions. Quite the opposite. With the right tools, they can turn the complexity of regulation into a competitive advantage.
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