Top Takeaways From The 2021 StarCompliance Fall Forum
Fixing a bad cert send. The power of repeatable workflows. Unknown unknowns and how to surface them. All this and more as we give you the best of this year’s North America Fall Forum
The Star Fall Forum brought together compliance’s best and brightest from across North America to listen to an all-star lineup of Star subject matter experts, offer feedback to those experts, and interact with colleagues on all things compliance and STAR Platform related. Here are the top takeaways from the conference:
1. THE JOY OF THE CERTIFICATION DO-OVER
We’ve all been there in one form or another. You compose some vital communique, are 100% certain you got everything right, hit send, and then shortly thereafter—or sometimes immediately—you realize you most certainly didn’t get everything right. That something has gone out to a person or group of people that shouldn’t have. You may wonder in moments like these why some smart cookie hasn’t recognized this as a persistent problem in our tech-driven society and figured out how to address it. Some way to undo, or at least tidily redo, what you’ve mistakenly done. When it comes to sending out certifications in the STAR Platform, that’s exactly what some smart cookies at Star have figured out.
In the Fall Forum session, aptly titled, How To Fix A Botched Cert Send, Star Senior Analyst Lloyd Chambers took attendees step-by-step through this vital process. Lloyd looked at a scenario where a Q3 certification went out to a group of users, only to then find out that corrections needed to be made to the wording within the cert. He then showed in detail how to: add and remove fields within the cert; edit a document in order to remove those fields; run reports to determine which users have submitted the cert and which have yet to complete it; delete multiple certs in bulk; and finally re-request the updated version. But seeing is believing, and understanding. To see this process in action, as presented by Lloyd in his session using STAR demo software, simply click here.
2. THE POWER OF REPEATABLE WORKFLOWS
Steve Brown is not only Star’s Head Of Business Development, he’s also a longtime compliance officer and was there at the start of the control room compliance phenomenon. Steve conducted a Fall Forum session titled Compliance Control Room: Practical Applications For Buyside Firms, where he waxed insightfully on—among other things—the importance of repeatable workflows in controlling MNPI.
“In any scenario where the proper monitoring of MNPI can make or break a deal, a repeatable workflow process is critical,” says Steve. “It’s always been critical, but in this day and age it’s more critical than ever. The last year and a half has seen an unprecedented amount of change in finance. Everyone suddenly working from home, and equally suddenly your process for physically separating people by desk and by floor is gone. And now we may be at the dawn of hybrid work, just about the time compliance figured out how to handle remote-only work. Add to that increased turnover in the workforce, and then throw in downsizing. Regtech SaaS offerings are perfectly suited to help you get repeatable workflows up and running quickly and with continuing flexibility to accommodate change, whatever form it takes. APIs and file feeds let you link isolated systems and channel important data into single platforms for easier monitoring and better decision making. And automation is the ultimate expression of the repeatable workflow: letting you set-and-forget and know you’ll be alerted if anything critical is surfaced by the software.”
Access the full recording of Compliance Control Room: Practical Applications For Buyside Firms here.
3. DISCOVERING THE UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS
There are things we know, things we know we don’t know, and things we don’t know we don’t know. This concept was made famous by Donald Rumsfeld, a former US Secretary of Defense. His thinking was, it’s these unknown unknowns that can cause the most trouble. Rumsfeld was referencing the field of international relations, but the concept can apply to almost any field, including financial compliance. So how can compliance teams discover the unknown unknowns that may be putting the firm at risk?
One company figured it out, at least in the niche compliance field of political donations. Six Lambda was founded to take that kind of monitoring to the next level: to get to more of the available data, to get that data updated on a more frequent basis, and to automate the searching of that data so that risky activity will be surfaced even if no one is actively looking for it. “We were founded on the basis that you can confirm political contributions that were pre-cleared and anything else you were anticipating, but more importantly that you can also discover activity you weren’t anticipating.” So says Bill Donnell, who came over to StarCompliance in the recent Star acquisition of Six Lambda. Bill was one of our subject matter experts participating in the Fall Forum session, New & Improved Political Donations Tracking Capability. Here he is again: “We hear all the time, ‘how do I know what I don’t know?’ Our software discovers just that for you, automatically. Monitoring political contributions is typically a manual process, and an imperfect one. These Six Lambda capabilities, now part of Star, mean compliance can spend less time searching contribution databases and yet be able to surface more risky activity.”
Access the full recording of New & Improved Political Donations Tracking Capability here.
4. INSIGHTS WHERE AND WHEN YOU NEED THEM
How Star’s New Cloud Data Platform Will Be A Compliance Program Gamechanger: the name of another Fall Forum session and a very bold claim. Gary Chamberlain—one of the session moderators as well as a Director and Product Manager at Star—was ready to back it up, though. But first a bit about what the new cloud data platform is. Gary: “The new cloud data platform has three main components. Star’s proprietary data-pump service will pull data from our employee conflicts of interest platform—the STAR Platform—as well as our control room product, Compliance Control Room. That data is pushed into the Snowflake data cloud, where it will be housed. Insights from the data are then delivered through ThoughtSpot.”
And that’s the key to why this new cloud data platform will be such a compliance program gamechanger. In the end, data is only of use if it can provide knowledge, and insights. Again, Gary: “This new cloud data platform will give you simple and easy ways to move data across your organization and access it where and when it’s needed. No more forwarding around spreadsheets full of data. No more bespoke processes to import the data into your organization. You’ll be able to create and download custom reports at will, or schedule them through ThoughtSpot. You’ll be able to get answers to your questions directly from within STAR. Interactivity will allow you to drill-in as you wish. There’s built-in natural language search, and machine learning guidance to help you answer your own questions and share these answers with your colleagues. That can include any custom data you might have, too. Data will be right in your hands—when you want it and where you want it—with performance that scales with the organization.”
Access the recording of How Star’s New Cloud Data Platform Will Be A Compliance Program Gamechanger here.
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