The Global Financial Services Compliance Portal
About Us
“All your
compliance news & reference tools for one low price.”
Chairman’s message
In our niche of UK financial
services compliance news & reference we are a clear choice. We
aim to be the most relevant and user-friendly. This is achievable
through two simple doctrines. Firstly we only sell what people want
to buy. Secondly we only make what we are good at.
Mission
We want to be stakeholders’
favourite UK financial services regulation information
provider.
Stakeholders include staff,
business partners, investors and clients. We will achieve this by
being exciting to work for, nice to do business with, profitable to
invest in and useful for subscribers. We will give more for less.
We will be compliance staff’s favourite time saver by making sense
of regulation.
What do we sell?
Compliance Online is the UK
financial services compliance portal. This vertically integrated
portal combines worldwide navigation with UK content to provide a
database of news & reference.
You may think we are in the
technology, software, publishing, news or reference business. You
may even think we sell news and research tools. What we really sell
is subscribers’ time back to them. Our reference products save time
by cutting through the waffle and our newsletters alert some
readers to the fact that they need to read a relevant story and
others to the fact that on a given day there is no breaking news
they need to worry about in their remit. You could liken us to a
regulatory metal detector. If the regulator tries to sneak a rule
change through your door, we let you know.
Clients
“Chap’s not subscribed to
Compliance Online. I mean, what kind of compliance officer is
he?”
We have already signed up hundreds
of household names in the banking, asset management, capital
markets, insurance and retail intermediary sectors. Testimonials
are available, as are names of firms in your sector who have
subscribed.
Product
“Trusted”
Compliance Online is a
subscription-based online UK financial services regulation portal
including news and research tools.
Subscribers access the archives,
news & reference tools via their web browser. Subscription fees
depend on size of firm, allowing access for a maximum number of
users. This satisfies compliance staff’s need for staying up to
date.
Many requests for additions or
tweaks come from users, which creates a sense of community and thus
stickiness, increasing loyalty and ensuring the solutions match the
need. In other words it helps us ensure we are selling what people
want to buy rather than what we want to make.
Our editorial and technical teams
have a rolling plan of dozens of product enhancements,
mini-products or mini projects to add to the site content and
improve its usability.
So if a compliance officer wants to
find out something they come to us, whether it is:
- "where can I find an outsourcer for my complaints?",
- "where can I find a consultant to draft a new compliance
manual?",
- "what conferences are coming up soon on money
laundering?",
- "where can I find a better paid job?",
- "where can I find an agency to recruit a compliance
analyst?",
- "where can I find a compliance trainer",
- "what happened last month while I was on holiday?",
- "what is the breaking news?" or
- "what's the rule on advertising bonds to pensioners?".
The Compliance Challenge
Confused? You will be, unless you
subscribe to us…
Lawlex Operational Risk and
Compliance Survey Nov 2005:
- “keeping abreast of regulatory changes continues to
overwhelm”
- 47% say keeping up to date with regulatory changes is
“difficult”/”very difficult” (only 4% thought it was “very easy”
and 14% “easy”)
Society of Pension Consultants,
press release 8th Sep 2005:
- Complexity & compliance are the top two obstructions to 46%
of employers
Futures & Options Association,
press release 22nd June 2005:
- “Regulation viewed as the single greatest challenge facing the
derivatives market.”
John Parker, Chairman, Building
Societies Association, speaking 5th May 2005:
- “The overall picture continues to be one of excess,
multi-faceted regulation where there is very considerable
uncertainty, over-lapping rules and principles, and an inadequate
recognition of the long term benefits of competition in delivering
consumer value.”
Political influences include a
pro-consumer government, the Financial Services Authority governed
by a pro-consumer Financial Services and Markets Act and the
pro-consumer Treasury Select Committee who hold FSA and regulated
firms to account. The end result is an ever-expanding regime of
complicated regulations which need navigating and keeping up to
date with. Despite denials, the trend is for governments of both
main parties and Brussels to increase regulation and thus their own
power, which feeds demand for tools to understand it.
Social influences include
pro-consumer agitators such as Which? and the FSA Consumer Panel,
who are always calling for more compliance. The compensation
culture seems to be ever growing, and this drives regulated firms
to pre-empt claims by being super-compliant.
Business Model
The business model of such a vortal
is that all traffic comes through us and so visitors either buy a
solution from us or from an advertiser, giving us the ability to
justify subscription fees for content from firms wanting this one
stop shop and to obtain advertising fees from third parties.
Market
“Specialist”
Our market is any firm concerned by
UK financial services regulation. This includes retail
intermediaries, capital markets firms, asset managers, banks,
insurers and consultants. The FSA alone regulates tens of thousands
of firms, then there are the advisers, experts and trade bodies on
the periphery.
The scope of UK financial services
compliance keeps expanding, e.g. the Financial Services Authority
started statutorily regulating 25,000 mortgage and general
insurance retail brokers in 2003 and 2004, before being forced to
take on home reversions and SIPPs in 2007.
Compliance departments need a way
of keeping up to date with increasing volumes of news and
regulations coming at them from all directions in often
unpredictable volumes at unpredictable times. A typical year sees
FSA issue 5,000 pages of papers plus updates to the 8,500-page
rulebook.
The need to stay up to date with
compliance existed before even the regulator had a website, and
started in 1986 when the FSA86 was passed and firms needed to
limber up ready for coming into force in 1988.
Firms are increasingly centralizing
control of information for cost, control and reputational reasons,
e.g. intranets. Firms are increasingly looking to online solutions
for information access, transmission and processing. A
realistically priced one-stop shop for compliance information is
therefore just the ticket.
Ownership
“There’s only one regulator.
There’s only one rulebook. There’s only one Compliance Online.”
OK, so there are other regulators
and rulebooks that apply to some FSA regulated firms, and we link
to those, but make no mistake FSA is the focus of our subscribers'
attention. Certainly we are the only online compliance information
provider supplying value added reference content for the UK market,
as opposed to black letter law.
We are a private company limited by
shares, established in England, owned 100% by Delta Compliance Ltd
(“DCL”), which is owned one third by director Daryl Peagram and two
thirds by Delta Recruitment International Ltd (“DRI”, which is
owned half by director Barry Ollier and half by director Roger
Tipple).
Advisers
Lawyers - Morgan Cole
Accountants - BDO Stoy Hayward
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