With The FCA now focusing on the implementation of MiFIDII plus with the SMCR and GDPR also on the way, we are now seeing far more focus on transparency, accountability, roles and responsibilities.
What is clear is that ‘old school’ compliance tools and techniques have been found wanting. This has been shown by the recent FCA suitability review paper, which found 41.7% of firms assessed breached disclosure rules.
It is quite clear then that ‘tickbox’ compliance has failed. The process of checking the firm's practice against the rule-book is one dimensional in its output. What firms now need is to challenge this and ask the ‘so what’ and ‘what’s next’ questions.
This means thinking and acting constructively and strategically, not just operationally. Strategic planning is leveraging internal and external resources to get to where you need and want to get to and this requires a constructive mindset. By constructive we mean focusing on:
- Achievement: Setting high standards and objectives across compliance and business development. This means ensuring you have the strategy, guidance and advice required to not only comply with regulation but also go above and beyond and challenge current practice, ensuring professional practice is embedded into your firm’s culture
- Affiliation: This means teamwork and encouraging engagement in placing client needs at the centre of the business services. By ensuring your team knows and buys into your firm's professional standards and acts in a uniform way across key regulatory directives such as MiFIDII’s requirement to record client communications uniformly and disclosing costs and services clearly, means not only will you be compliant, but you’ll also be highly effective and profitable too
- Aspiration: Tied into your standards and teamwork, aspirational professional development means ensuring you surround yourself with highly competent, effective people, ensuring you are armed with high quality Management Information and setting your services around a highly engaging client proposition that has the effect of constructively enhancing the client experience
These ‘3 A’s’ will allow you to move from a transactional approach to your compliance and business development requirements to a more compliant, fulfilling and rewarding one. By assessing your current practice and activities and investigating any blind spots or areas for improvement, you will begin the process of diagnosis and evidence based practice to emerge where you can then look for the internal or external resources to improve across key compliance needs such as disclosure, advice suitability, data integrity and quality and professional practice.
Model Office-MO's digital compliance framework offers a diagnostic assessment of where you currently sit against The FCA rules, their papers and other directives such as MiFIDII, GDPR and benchmark practice against your peers. Once you have your scores, MO’s algorithm will offer guidance and steers to help improve (where necessary) so you have the ‘so what' and ‘what’s next’ questions answered.
So our challenge to you is to take a view into the world of digital compliance and business development and experience the real possibilities for building a highly compliant, client-centric and sustainable professional practice at a fraction of the costs associated with checklist compliance.
Please click the below icon link to MO's platform and learn more about MO today..
