Benjamin Franklin famously said there were only two certain things in life – death and taxes. For those that have been working in the financial services industry for the past few years, a third would be added – regulatory change.

Be it Dodd Frank, MiFID II, EMIR, SEPA or other acronym-defined regulations, the ability of organisations to adapt to and adopt the changes is becoming a competitive advantage. For those that are ineffective, both the upfront and on-going maintenance costs will result in a cost base that can’t be sustained. Add in new market entrants, particularly in retail banking, and the world of regulation is not just a headache, but may just play a decisive role in the future of the industry.

With so much regulation, one of the core challenges is understanding exactly how they all come together in the underlying processes that allow institutions to conduct their business. For example, how does the KYC process meet the requirements of the AML Regulations of 2007 and MiFID II’s new requirements coming in next year? Combining policy, regulation, process, people and technology is difficult – which is why changing it is painful.

At Clarasys, we can help take the complexity out of this minefield and produce transparency and visibility over how your organisation complies with its regulatory obligations. We also know that the approach we take is laying the groundwork to enable the partial automation of future regulatory change.

So what’s the vision? A single place to understand how different regulations are being applied within your business all the way down to work instruction level.

How?

Our partner BusinessOptix has a market leading tool in business modelling, allowing everything to defined from strategy to execution in a single place. This means that regulations can be mapped against process, people and technology for stakeholders from the board room to analyst.

This means:

• Providing an overview of the business operating model;
• Understanding the transformation journey to deliver change;
• Mapping of processes against technology, people, policy, data and other attributes that matter to you;
• Creating easy to use knowledge articles that reduce onboarding time and drive consistency in execution
• Analysing the impact of process change on people, cost and risk.

This can provide our clients with a single view on how regulations are implemented in their organisation, which functions they are reliant on for end-to-end compliance, which systems are business critical to maintaining compliance and what the business case is for implementing change in different areas.

So what happens when regulations change? You will already know what and who is impacted, you will rapidly be able to determine the impact of adopting new regulation and you will already have a central knowledge base that can act as your primary medium for communicating the changes through impacted parts of the organisation. In its simplest sense, you will significantly reduce the time and cost to changing your organization’s ways of working to reflect new regulatory requirements.