Puritas examine the optimum response to increasing regulatory reporting requirements
What are the worries keeping you awake at night? And which leave you in a cold sweat each morning?
Plenty of commonplace candidates. Family issues perhaps? Money matters? Health concerns?
What about regulatory reporting?
While meeting this demand certainly won’t make most people’s worry shortlist, for some it’s a nagging cause for concern. Not least due to plenty of headline-grabbing stories reporting the fate of those who fall short of expectations.
As a finance industry insider with many years of regulatory experience, Mike Feighan of Jersey-based client administration systems specialist Puritas is all too familiar with the implications.
‘I’ve watched financial regulatory and compliance expectations grow from a low-key back-office function to become mainstream company concern,’ he expands. ‘This means that just about everyone in the industry knows what’s needed. The challenge, however, is meeting the demands of multiple jurisdictions, with differing perspectives and ever-changing priorities. It all keeps me awake at times – and I’m surely not the only one.’
The solution for a better night’s sleep is obvious of course. Just have the investment client administration systems in place to easily meet today’s reporting demands and built in capacity to meet those of tomorrow. Yet reality, however, is that just as regulation expectations have evolved over time, so too have administration and reporting systems. The result, in many cases, is a far from ideal situation.
‘We’re aware of finance companies still relying on multiple administration systems or even manual records to generate statutory client reports,’ Mike elaborates. ‘As new regulatory demands have emerged, they’ve adopted a ‘sticking plaster’ approach – fix the immediate shortcoming, and worry about the next one next. It works, to a fashion, but invariably results in longer term issues as new regulatory requirements expose the lack of integration or challenge system robustness. Which inevitably leads to another sticking plaster… then another. And a lack of sleep while worrying about the consequences.’
The preferred alternative is moving to a single, integrated administration system offering a ‘single source of truth’ for client data. And preferably one that will continuously develop to meet evolving regulatory reporting expectations. The challenge, according to Mike, is selecting the right one and then migrating from legacy to new.
‘Such systems are readily available,’ he continues, ‘and many companies are now using them. Puritas has developed PureClient, for example, which is presently used by some of the leading offshore fund administrators including JTC, IQEQ and the Fairway Group. And alongside this best in breed product, we’re fortunate to possess a team with deep finance industry understanding.’
That team includes customer relationship managers having comprehensive awareness of present and future regulatory reporting requirements. And software developers focusing on creating or integrating the features and functionality needed to meet them. Additionally, as Mike underlines, Puritas possess the project management expertise needed to smoothly move customers from what they have now to what’s needed in the future.
The result has been the successful migration of several clients from legacy systems to a single source of truth approach based on PureClient. Concurrently, a thorough cleanse of existing client data was undertaken as part of the process. This importantly means the new system possesses a robust starting point for all regulatory reporting requirements, while improved administration processes mean it should stay that way in the future.’
‘I can’t guarantee there won’t be a few sleepless nights while were making all the changes,’ Mike concludes, ‘but we have hopefully created a situation that leads to sweet dreams in the future.’
For further information on Puritas, its products, capabilities, and client’s email Mike Feighan michael.feighan@puritas.co.uk or call on +44 1534 874 100.
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