Most organisations that eventually fall foul of regulation will have made significant investments to avoid exactly that scenario. Failure usually comes about because of one of:
- Rule changes happened and the business wasn’t aware or flexible enough to properly adapt.
- The business changed and the old compliance procedure failed to keep up. Common scenarios include the opening of a new location, launch of a new product line, or new people joining the organisation.
- Business processes were just not strong enough to ensure compliance all of the time and breaches occurred.
Kingston Smith Consulting helps to address all of these risks. This can take the form of a ‘fully inclusive’ outsourced compliance service in which we take on the challenge of ensuring your business stays compliant.
Alternatively we can support you with targeted services to achieve an immediate objective. We can health check your regulatory compliance regime and identify the gaps and vulnerable processes. We can provide advice and support to correct these where necessary. Recognising that training and awareness now play a pivotal role in most regulatory regimes, we offer a wide range of first class training solutions to embed knowledge and rule friendly behaviours in your business. Where new systems or procedures need to be developed we can work with you to prepare and implement these.
Where regulatory regimes require ongoing monitoring by management we can build and operate these mechanisms. These can take the form of management information metrics that need to be monitored, for instance under "treating customers fairly" rules, or transaction testing to ensure compliance, for instance under FSA rules on financial product sales, Sarbanes-Oxley key control testing or Sharia Board oversight for Islamic financial products. Today, recognised good practice is for this testing to be executed by specialists operating independently of the business team. Kingston Smith Consulting can provide monitoring which meets the highest standards.
Where the regulator mandates regular reporting of information, we can help ensure this information is accurate. This includes tax reporting, and a large number of data requirements from the Financial Services Authority. Errors in reporting are likely to be unintentional, caused by poor data quality or an error prone process for consolidating and manipulating that data. We can identify weaknesses in the data process and quality issues in the underlying data, allowing your organisation to understand the scale of the problem and take steps to fix it.
