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