Ep 31: Better Compliance at Lower Cost

The increasing automation and technical capability of the finance industry has not only provided efficiencies in enabling a multibillion dollar economy to grow, it has also evolved unintended consequences resulting in opportunities for misjudgement, misconduct and misuse. 

Government regulatory oversight is designed to contain and manage this through reducing the risk of company failure and potential failures of the global monetary system, as well as to protect customers and their money from fraud or unethical conduct.

Having regulation to protect everyone from ‘bad’ or unconsciously unethical behaviour has to be a good thing, however the realities of implementing regulation is complex, expensive to retrofit, and rarely done ‘by design’ in New Zealand.  It’s rapidly changing and difficult to get right in evolving business environments, and when it goes wrong it is very, very expensive. 

With the pace of change Technology has to be the answer for this to be more effective in order that companies of all sizes and budgets can meet the rapid increase in regulation with efficient automated solutions that enable us to ethically protect the industry, ourselves, staff and customers.

Today I talk with Janet Chenery about how technology can help businesses be more compliant, with out spending a fortune on compliance

Janet has over 20 years of experience managing diverse technology teams and delivering change in the Financial sector, Technology and Regulatory. Originally from the UK, Janet moved to Singapore with  Barclays Capital in 2006 managing teams and expanding the Global Software Development Centre to then 5 years later, evolve and transition it further to lower cost global locations.   

Since moving to New Zealand in 2013 Janet has been focussed on Regulatory change projects and becoming passionate about compliance by design, working on some of the key legislative changes for New Zealand,  FMCA, CLR, CCCFA, AML, GDPR and Conduct, and is increasingly frustrated with the acceptance of largely manual approaches and the lack of opportunity to digitize compliance and keep up with Financial technology advances.

To address her frustration Janet has engaged with the Tech Futures Lab here in Auckland, juggling work by embarking on a  part-time Master of Technological Futures  journey to  see what a different form of Regulatory Change might look like for the future, be that near or distant.

Janet is involved in (and managed) Women in IT, Diversity groups, Graduate programmes including Shadowtech, as well as being a mentor and forming communities of practice for project management and Agile ways of working.