Johannesburg, 24 Apr 2024
msg Rethink Compliance, the anti-financial crime compliance business within the international msg group, has introduced its advanced new anti-financial crime governance platform to South African enterprises.
msg group is a 1.4 billion Euro group of IT and business consulting companies, with over 10 000 experts in 32 countries. The group’s Rethink Compliance business harnesses advanced digital tools to combat financial crime: from cutting-edge risk assessment systems and AI-powered data bots, to automated backtesting solutions and robust GRC platforms.
Available in South Africa through Bateleur Software, the new platform enables intelligent, end-to-end governance and policy management, to keep pace with changing legislation and ensure compliance across multiple countries and branches. The solution addresses the risks and delays associated with manual governance processes and federated approaches to anti-financial crime.
Lizette Sander, Product Manager at Bateleur Software, says the new platform has been welcomed at events held recently to showcase it to the local market. “The market is excited, describing it as a ‘next level’ solution,” she says.
Gerhard Hess, EMEA Sales Director at msg Rethink Compliance, says the platform enables the efficient management of anti-financial crime governance and compliance across the entire lifecycle − from monitoring regulatory changes to managing policy, procedure and controls. Ultimately, potential gaps and redundancies can be identified without the need to rewrite or redesign policies and procedures. This is a huge benefit to organisations, as legal and compliance expertise can be quickly refocused to ensure compliance and avoid fines and reputational damage.
The platform delivers transparency and consistency in policies, procedures and controls across the organisation. It improves operational efficiency by automating regulatory monitoring and policy management processes and builds compliance resilience with AI-powered regulatory intelligence, impact analysis and change management support to minimise risk, increase resilience and ensure sustainable growth.
Hess says: “We have just launched the platform to the market and a number of pilot projects are already under way in Europe. Built-in AI features including a web crawler will help customers proactively search for changes and updates in legislation. While the primary focus of the platform is banks, insurance firms and fintechs, we also see interest and use cases in other highly-regulated sectors, such as oil and gas, and the chemical industry.”
Khanh Nguyen, Lead Business Consultant at msg Rethink Compliance, says: “Our differentiator is that we integrate the entire governance process – from identifying new regulations through to implementation of compliant policies and processes.”
She explains that the platform features industry best practice workflows: “If there is a new regulation or a change to regulations, there is a fixed workflow through several entities so users can sign off, accept, add comments and implement it, with timestamps attached to each process,” she says.
“These processes must be done in a timely manner, and institutions must be able to demonstrate that they distributed new requirements through the group and that local entities received them and acknowledged them,” she says and states: “Finally, a chief compliance officer or group compliance officer must ensure coherent governance, which is becoming increasingly difficult in the face of sometimes conflicting international regulations and regulatory pressure for compliance robustness.”
Reinventing inefficient processes and reducing risk
Traditionally, these workflows have been highly manual, involving disparate documents and forms, with e-mails between departments and country offices. By integrating all communication and workflows into a centralised platform, compliance is no longer seen as a cost centre but as a strategic partner contributing to the institution's resilience and competitive advantage.
msg Rethink Compliance says digitising and automating the entire landscape addresses challenges such as operational inefficiencies and a lack of transparency and coordination. The company notes: “A siloed approach complicates the alignment process, increases manual effort, and hinders effective communication, leaving gaps in the compliance framework. Disparate systems and manual processes often result in redundant information and procedures, making it difficult to maintain a coherent compliance posture across the organisation. This inconsistency not only increases the likelihood of regulatory findings but also escalates remediation efforts and costs.”
In addition, siloed and manual processes make preparing for audits time-consuming and costly. msg Rethink Compliance says: “An inability to swiftly provide specific regulatory, business unit, or product line information can lead to audit inefficiencies, increased scrutiny, and potential findings against the institution.”
msg Rethink Compliance aims to help organisations overcome the risks, challenges and costs associated with siloed, manual processes, making governance and policy management centralised and streamlined.
Nguyen says: “The new platform has the unique feature of creating structured content out of the policy control matrix with structured rules which helps automate subsequent processes – so organisations can also run gap analyses, and receive suggestions on new rules and policies.”
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