With 2021 set to bring about a tidal wave of regulatory reforms, Australian financial services institutions are fast running out of time to implement new mandatory reporting practices for potential regulatory breach issues — including fee miscalculations, deficient consumer advice or cyber-attacks — but the launch of a new ‘RegTech’ platform by national law firm Gadens is set to dramatically improve the regulatory reporting landscape for its users.
Gadens Breach Manager — the first-of-its-kind, cloud-based RegTech platform which officially launched this month — streamlines the information collation, assessment and reporting process of potential regulatory issues to one online platform, allowing financial services institutions across the country to ensure defensible, timely and cost-effective compliance with the new and newly important regimes, including BEAR/FAR, ADI, AFSL and ACL obligations, AML/CTF, Privacy and Design & Distribution.
The user-friendly platform is protected from a cyber, legal privilege and server standpoint, and is designed to be exceptionally cost-effective — with zero legal costs to Gadens’ clients for in-house user flow (i.e. directed to in-house legal counsel/compliance), and a low-cost fixed fee option for external support and advice from Gadens’ legal professionals.
Gadens Breach Manager meets strict industry reporting requirements and ensures quality legal advice is obtained on whether a regulatory breach has occurred (and, if so, preparation of the regulatory report itself) and what to do next within sharp statutory timeframes, dramatically reducing the risk of legal ramifications for financial services organisations and their senior accountable employees.
Gadens Chairman Paul Spiro said with the introduction of at least seven overlapping and time-sensitive mandatory reporting regimes to directly affect the financial services sector by 5 October 2021, organisations need to seriously consider how they will prepare for and respond to the impending changes. He noted that ASIC is investing in greater technology around this space, and the private sector needs to do the same to keep up.
“While there was a myriad of developments to come out of the Hayne Royal Commission, new oversight regimes and more stringent regulatory breach reporting are some of the key areas affecting the financial services sector, exposing institutions and their senior executives personally to the prospect of liability for non-adherence,” he said.
“As a banking and finance driven firm, we identified the serious need for financial institutions to evaluate their reporting preparedness and risk position with the 2021 regulation changes. We have been very committed to finding a way to meaningfully help our clients meet this challenge. Our solution is the Gadens Breach Manager, and it is gratifying to see the up-take by clients already and how they are modifying the platform to extract even more value for themselves.”
Powered and hosted externally by Australian legal technology company Lawcadia, Gadens Breach Manager uses an intelligent and secure platform engine — Lawcadia Intelligence™ — supported by an ISO 27001 certified information security management system accepted by many large organisations.
Gadens Director Liam Hennessy said the mandatory reporting of potential regulatory issues has become a key concern for financial services organisations which are already struggling to manage the volume of information, time and resourcing pressure, and legal complexity of these sensitive issues.
“Regulatory reporting regimes in the Australian financial services industry are rapidly becoming more onerous in an attempt to regulate and improve culture, with liability for getting it wrong judgmentally or timing-wise,” he said.
“We designed the Gadens Breach Manager to allow our time-pressed clients to efficiently gather the right information in a protected environment, assess which of seven overlapping regimes the potential issue may fall under within statutory timeframes, and then get advice free-of-charge in-house or for a low fixed price externally. The client is in complete control from an audit perspective and may elect to customise the platform for their internal needs.
“We are solving an efficiency, regulatory risk and cost problem for our clients who are using the platform, leveraging our firm’s deep financial services capability”.
With a greater focus on customer experience using digital solutions, Gadens is pioneering ways to minimise pain-points for clients.
This latest initiative complements Gadens’ existing technology offering, including Gadens Portfolio Solutions (a suite of online business-to-business programs, legal analysis and management tools), Gadens’ NUIX (Ringtail) / Relativity managed discovery offering (which adopts ‘technology assisted review’ to reduce lawyer hours on document reviews), and e-contracts / e-signing programs developed during COVID-19.
