Apiax Head of Business Development on Elevating Compliance Processes for both Efficiency & Business Generation

RegTech Apiax has built a reputation for delivering digital solutions that help companies of all sizes and across different industries comply with global regulations. Despite the many challenges since the pandemic hit in early 2020, Apiax has since opened offices in Singapore, London and Frankfurt and registered fairly dramatic growth, expanding the worldwide team today to over 80 people. In the financial sector, the big picture mission is to embed compliance into any business system and process for Apiax clients and to become the one-stop-hub of rules and regulations for financial institutions of all sizes. Alan Blanchard who heads up Business Development for APIAX in the UK, joined our Hubbis Digital Dialogue panel on May 26 that focused on how private banks and leading EAMs are positioning their operations, teams, strategies, and technologies to seize the opportunities ahead and also overcome the inevitable challenges ahead in Asia. A key area for the experts was the perennial issue of compliance, and how digital solutions and the right strategies can help overcome these complex challenges.

Alan has been with Apiax since early 2019, having arrived armed with great experience from a five-year stint at the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. At Apiax, he has been relishing the opportunity to help develop the brand and market penetration across the world of compliance solutions and embracing the opportunity to help private banks and wealth management firms adopt digital tools and solutions that help them overcome the constantly mounting regulatory and compliance challenges.

Digital compliance solutions

He opened his observations by introducing himself and explaining that Apiax is a regulatory technology organisation, founded in Switzerland in 2017. “In essence, for any particular activity or process, we digitise all of the rules and regulations, policies, and controls that sit behind that and make that accessible digitally, in real-time ideally, and embedded in whatever processes the relationship managers are using,” he reported. “And then we can maintain all of the content, making sure that all the content is up to date, and that the delivery of that is more efficient.”

Alan addressed some comments by a fellow panellist on bespoke conversations, stating that to facilitate this the RMs need the right information available at the right time, and delivered in the right format and through the right channel. “This means the RMs can easily help the clients by explaining the products available, and the risks associated with each of those,” he explained.

Working with the wealth industry

“We have the technologies now that enable that, and it is not something that banks have to do themselves,” he continued. “To achieve this, we work with a combination of advisory experts, we will have a network of what we will call content experts, who will always know the key terms of the rules and regulations that are attributable on a client level. And we can be very granular in terms of how we divide up that content, how we analyse it and access it and then serve it back to the relationship manager.”

He also said that Apiax also supports clients from the KYC perspective, helping them obtain easy access to what is actually required in law and helping convert the regulator to a ‘friendly’ party as the client is constantly able to demonstrate that they know precisely what is required to onboard their customers.

Improving speed, efficiency and cost

“You then deliver a much better outcome for the client as a result, because you can start speeding up those processes,” he said. “And we understand that our customers also want to resolve the often very considerable tension between the non-digital regulatory requirements which have existed for many, such as wet signatures, proof of address, and so forth, and move as much to digital processes that can overcome these hurdles. We appreciate our customers want to get all this down to as few clicks as possible from the end-clients’ point of view.”

Alan also touched on the conduct and guidance of the people involved in these processes., observing that a mission is to digitise some of the complexity that sits behind those processes, by putting in place the guidelines that achieve a certain amount of automation in the compliance and the controls.

Incremental improvements

“I don't think we will all ever get to a point where the industry can figure this out 100%, but we can all work to remove an awful lot of the margin for error around any piece of businesses being transacted. It is easy for someone to make a mistake, we're all only human, but the more technology we can apply to help overcome these issues the better.”

He added that the benefits also extend well beyond efficiencies and cost savings, as the Apiax solutions help ensure that the compliance content that their customers have in place is constantly updated, and constantly available omni-channel.

Providing value-added solutions

“You thereby drive much better value from your compliance spend,” he said. “And as it is significantly automated, you do of  course remove a lot of internal processes, and you are thereby freeing up the bankers and advisors to engage in more and better client interactions, more revenue-generating activities. Moreover, the solutions also result in risk mitigation; ideally, we all want to get the risk of making compliance mistakes down to zero, although to be honest, that is still an ambitious goal for all of us now, I think we can agree.”

Drivers for change

Alan also touched on some of the reasons for clients engaging Apiax. “Sometimes, clients are under pressure directly from the regulators to address some key shortcomings,” he said. In these cases, the objective is very clear for everyone that there is a failure somewhere internally that we can help fix. And other clients might have all the regulatory content, but it is not up to date. They realise that the old way of obtaining legal advice, especially for multi-jurisdictional coverage, is onerous and costly, so they come to us for plug and play solutions.”

Another core reason for working with Apiax is to support the business generation side. “The clients see that we can help them boost activity and productivity and generate more calls, a better client experience, and thereby achieve a competitive advantage over our other market participants,” he explained. “Honestly, this is not as strong a motivator as pressure from the regulator, but it is also an important reason and an important part of what we can do for our clients.”

Escalating demands require advanced solutions

In an interview with Alan that Hubbis published in October last year, Alan had at the time neatly summarised his views specifically on the challenges in Asia. He had said there is no doubt that there are numerous and intensifying compliance challenges across Asia, as regulators in each country and globally demand ever-higher standards of monitoring and reporting, greater individual and corporate accountability, and as they roll out ever more demanding compliance audits.

At the same time, he said the banks and other wealth management firms were trying to enhance their understanding of compliance issues and the approach to handling challenges amongst their client-facing and administrative teams.

Better compliance means better business

Those observations help close off his commentary from the May 26 event. “Apiax can come to clients and offer relevant solutions, from onboarding and throughout the business and administrative machinery internally,” he told delegates. “Ever since the pandemic hit, the need for digitisation to help with business continuity has risen significantly, and this is also true for the legal and compliance side, where digital solutions are just as important as for the business generators.”

And his final word to delegates on May 26: “The answer to enabling innovation and growth despite increasing regulatory complexity is to invest in new, digital, compliance frameworks that reduce the interpretation of ambiguous legal texts, provide clear answers at a granular level and improve the accessibility of regulatory knowledge,” he stated.