Compliance Management

Business Situation

Our client is a successful business entrepreneur based out of UK for last 12 years. CSL’s main business is providing compliance consultancy and RegTech services to firms that are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority or the Prudential Regulation Authority. This is a heavily regulated sector and many firms employ consultants such as CSL to keep them on the right side of the regulator.

CSL is growing well and needs to start considering its own internal management systems. A key element of terminology is the Compliance Monitoring Programme or “CMP”. This is a list of actions that need to be taken on a regular basis (different frequency for different actions, from daily to annually) to prove the compliance of the business. It might include checking client files, reviewing the board minutes and so on. Included in the accompanying Excel file is an extract from a CMP and a sample of an annual view of the CMP once it has been scheduled and a chronological view.

Challenges

As a business CSL has several challenges. Central to this is the management of remote staff carrying out many actions up and down the country on a regular scheduled basis – e.g. implementing a CMP for each client. These need to be tracked and recorded as complete and the time spent recorded against them. Completion of these actions includes identifying the status of client contracts – i.e. have we completed all the actions that we need to do to honour the contract? This specification describes the steps taken to get there.

A further motivation behind this application is to portray ourselves as differentiated and market leading to clients. Therefore, a client login employs the services to access their own data.

Ensure software quality and reliability

The company’s services include the development of components, functions and simulations systems integration and networking, information and testing systems. Since software drives the functionality of these systems, comprehensive quality management and quality assurance measures must be employed in software development. The development team wanted to capture required functionality and manage any changes so that they can catch and resolve quality issues in an efficient manner.

Solutions

The most important technical design aspect of this system is that consultants and other system users can login and use it very quickly. This is to be discussed over time but is likely to include automatic logging in for consultants when their PC is switched on and uploading Excel files of timesheets and so on. This will be developed over time however, and does not unnecessarily impact the first three stages.

Have a single system Superuser and then Consultant, Admin and Staff logins

Tracking and auditing everything – when records are changed, added and deleted is critical – this is a Compliance Monitoring application, our own monitoring needs to be first rate.

Cannot delete a record and leave rogue records under any circumstances

Generally we should deactivate rather than delete key records

Configurable Error messages by CSL end.

Graphic design is critical , basic look and feel to ensure it looks first class. In practice we will provide screen designs to the developer.

Speed and reliability are critical. All design standards should ensure data integrity.

Export to Excel (including what we have learned about stripping out spaces from numbers etc. to be included for all relevant screens – probably on an icon this time)

Over time we will build in much more flexibility over menu options for different user types and specific users – so some clients will have different functions to others

The application needs to be tested on all main browsers. If it does not work on any given browser then it should auto detect and say “use a plug-in to make it look like IE”