Problematic Spreadsheets — GECKO’s Solution
The governance tool for organising data and compliance related projects within financial services organisations has traditionally been, and still remains, Spreadsheets. However, companies who are reliant on spreadsheets face many challenges, the fundamental one being that they only give you a static snapshot of where things were, not where they are at an exact moment in time.
Spreadsheets limit a user’s visibility of emerging problems making it virtually impossible to quickly detect, and eradicate them. As a result, deadlines are often missed and remain overdue, and companies find themselves failing to comply with regulations. Even the smallest error can result in significant losses and cause irreparable damage to professional credibility. For this reason, the financial services sector needs to adapt to the demand for digitalisation and disruptive technologies (i.e. RegTech, Blockchain, Machine Learning and AI), to better serve client’s needs, creating cost efficiencies and protecting themselves from any potential regulatory sanction.
The burden of regulation is ever-increasing, and since the financial crisis, compliance has become more complex and has been a major headache for financial institutions to digest and adhere to. The cost of compliance and reporting has continued to grow, placing more onerous reporting and regulatory burdens on Financial Institutions. A recent report published by Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence titled “Cost of Compliance 2019”, outlined 50% of Compliance Officers spend their time focusing on other compliance activities as opposed to key areas such as liaison with control functions and board reporting. A risk and compliance executive of Middle Eastern Bank gave his view on his perceived biggest challenge for compliance in the next 10 years, “Day by day compliance challenges are growing and so the personal liability of compliance-staff. We expect, if the trend remains the same, it will become more and more difficult to find qualified and experienced staff especially at higher level.”
It is evident that Financial Institutions are struggling to manage this increased workload in-house and there is an urgent need for them to collaborate and work with RegTech providers. This is where GECKO Governance can help. Our technologically advanced solution is a governance management tool which provides real-time reporting and efficient monitoring and management of regulatory and compliance obligations. We have the expertise and products to implement our RegTech solution into Financial Institutions quickly and effectively.
In essence, we have built an agnostic program that is a compliance cockpit that fund managers, service providers, and regulators can oversight and manage their compliance processes more efficiently. We provide an optional blockchain integration, which immutably proves the steps to compliance. A spreadsheet, by comparison, can be created and edited without an audit trail, whereas, a blockchains record of activity cannot be tampered with.
GECKO allows organisations to embed a solid framework of compliance culture into everyday workflows. Unlike spreadsheets, our software is agile, accurate and provides real-time reporting to support your compliance requirements. Employees understand the difficulty spreadsheets present in terms of lack of visibility into work status causing frustration around project deliverables, workloads, and dependencies. GECKO Governance not only provides a seamless workload structure, but it also lays out high standards of expectations for individual behaviour across an organisation where everyone can undertake best practises and properly document processes and procedures. In the long-run, GECKO can save huge amounts of time and money enabling skilled compliance resources to focus on other key deliverables.
Natasha Quinn
natasha@geckogovernance.com
About GECKO Governance
GECKO Governance provides a suite of Advisory, Consulting and Technology services to the crypto and asset management industries.
The company was founded in 2014 and built the first RegTech solution globally to integrate with Blockchain.
The team have over 120+ years combined financial & crypto compliance experience and are based at 3 global offices — New York, Ireland (HQ) and Sydney, Australia.
Our Advisory and Consulting business provides clients with definitive compliance solutions for their crypto and fund projects on a global basis.
Reference: https://blogs.thomsonreuters.com/answerson/cost-of-compliance-survey-2019/
