by Michael McDonald and Kim Chandler McDonald, Co-Founders of FlatWorld™ IntegrationIt is rare to find a company anywhere, of any size, that is not acutely aware of compliance issues. We’ll bet yours is. Additionally, if that weren't enough, in all likelihood you’re in the midst of struggling with the implications of what, logically, should be a relatively simple task. But we’ll bet it isn’t.
Compliance normally takes the form of:
1. Regulatory (e.g. government legislation on Anti Money Laundering (AML), Privacy of data (GPDR), Regulatory Reporting (BCBS239) etc.);
2. Contractual (e.g. Reuters may license their data to your company under conditions); and/or
3. Voluntary (e.g. protecting user’s data etc.).
Generally, most boards and ‘the C-Suite’ (CEOs, CTOs, CIOs, etc) are more focused on number 1) - Regulatory; however, all three have the capacity to capsize a company if they are not dealt with correctly.
To give credit where it's due, most companies treat compliance requirements seriously and put aside (sometimes considerable) funds to address the issue. But, therein lies the root of most company’s challenges: understanding exactly what issues they are attempting to solve. Perhaps that’s your challenge too.
Simply put, to be compliant, you must prove to a third party (be that the government, an external auditor, a company that licenses their data to you) that:
a) You are capturing and securely storing all the data that you are required to.
b) That the data that you have captured and stored can only be altered and enriched by authorized systems/devices and/or people.
c) That extra data has not been added to and/or removed from the relevant data sources.
All this is expected of you in the vastly changed, and rapidly transforming, digital economy wherein the end-user experience (be they client, customer, colleague, partner or supplier) is everything.
To accommodate this seemingly endless list of end-user expectations, many companies are buying in and/or licensing external data sources. Are you? Perhaps you're merging data and then applying data science (machine learning or otherwise) to improve the relevance to your end-users in hopes that this will satisfy them.
Unfortunately most IT departments have:
a) A lot of different systems;
b) A lot of ‘’spaghetti' code trying to link those systems together; and
c) A lot of different views of data (e.g. hundreds if not thousands of Excel spreadsheets).
Combine these issues with your need to interact with ever more demanding end-users and external vendors (data providers or otherwise) and you find yourself in an extremely unenviable position of not knowing what your exposure is to compliance breaches. These breaches, be they regulatory, contractual or voluntary, will, at the very least result in bad PR; however, they can also lead to fines and, in some instances, the loss of your licence to trade.
Within your compliance struggle, there is a strategic opportunity in reimagining how to crack this conundrum simply, swiftly and securely while dealing with the high costs, complexities and slow moving realities of current approaches. That opportunity is at the heart of our Fl@World technology, which has data compliance and security built in and useable out-of-the-box. Fl@World is secure, compliant, fast, frictionless and easy for users across different divisions and/or organisations to use. To find out more about how Fl@World can help you, complete the form and one of our team will be in touch to organise a demonstration.