Innovation In Compliance With Tom Fox

In this concluding Episode V of special five-part podcast series on an innovative approach to managing third party risk we consider how to use of this information going forward. I have been joined by James Gellert, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Rapid Ratings International, which is sponsor of this special series. Our conversation has been on helping companies manage their third-party supply chains through financial health. The Rapid Rating approach is incredibly innovative, with both a series of products and services that should be considered by the compliance practitioner. In this Episode 5, we discuss the supply chain efficiency premium. Some of the highlights include:At the end of the day, companies want to continue working with their suppliers. The more companies can help them through any times of difficulty, the more it benefits everyone.This isn't just about triage and problems. It’s about creating the strongest chain of suppliers in one ecosystem that can grow with your business.The

We are on Episode IV of special five-part podcast series on an innovative approach to managing third party risk. This week I am joined by James Gellert, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Rapid Ratings International, which is sponsor of this special series. Our conversation will be on helping companies manage their third-party supply chains through financial health. The Rapid Rating approach is incredibly innovative, with both a series of products and services that should be considered by the compliance practitioner. In this Episode 4, we discuss some of the challenges Gellert sees in 2019 and going forward. Some of the highlights include:You can’t manage risks that are unknown. It’s not just about being able to identify the risks. It’s being able to action the data that emerges, and linking all those through the business units of a company. There are increasing number of risks and complexity of business relationships.Changes in capital markets and rising interest rates with a complicated g

We are on Episode III of special five-part podcast series on an innovative approach to managing third party risk. This week I am joined by James Gellert, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Rapid Ratings International, which is sponsor of this special series. Our conversation is about helping companies manage their third-party supply chains through financial health. The Rapid Rating approach is incredibly innovative, with both a series of products and services that should be considered by the compliance practitioner. In this Episode 3, we discuss the issue of third-party expansion. Highlights include:The definition of “third party” is expanding, which only makes life more complicated for anyone trying to do third party risk assessments.There are a lot of risks that people can't get around to managing because they can't even identify which companies are taking risks.The definition of third parties has expanded out to nth tier, adding an additional layer of complexity to risk management. All

In this special five-part podcast series on innovation in managing third party risk, I am joined by James Gellert, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Rapid Ratings International, which is sponsor of this special series. Our conversation will be on helping companies manage their third-party supply chains through financial health. The Rapid Rating approach is incredibly innovative, with both a series of products and services that should be considered by the compliance practitioner. In this Episode 2, we discuss the issue of criticality in supply chain and how to assess and manage that risk. Highlights include:How has the definition of criticality expanded?What does this mean for the supply chain professional or the compliance practitioner going forward?Innovation allows companies to manage all of those suppliers and all of those risks in a more cohesive way, creating more ways of doing more with less.If you can identify the risk direction of a company, then you’re able to survey a wider spectrum

Welcome to a special five-part podcast series on innovative in managing third party risk. This week I am joined by James Gellert, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Rapid Ratings International, which is sponsor of this special series. Our conversation will be on helping companies manage their third-party supply chains through assessing financial health. The Rapid Rating approach is incredibly innovative, with both a series of products and services that should be considered by the compliance practitioner. In this Episode 1, we begin with a discussion of why managing your supply chain risk is so critical in today’s business environment. Highlights include:What is supply chain financial health?Managing supply chain risk is critical in today’s economy.If the suppliers that you’re embedding into your business aren’t resilient or strong for the long term, then you’re baking problems into your ecosystem.How can you work to extend the reach of compliance? By understanding the business imperative and bu

What do you get when you mix podcasting with the law? Joining us on this episode is Gordon Firemark, an attorney in Los Angeles with a background in entertainment and podcasting law, and a podcaster himself. Find out how you can use podcasting to ethically market your firm, and how to protect yourself legally in this space. The growth of podcasting It’s developed as a really remarkable communications tool but is still underutilized in many ways. It’s very exciting and a great opportunity for lawyers and businesses that are looking to reach their audiences in a different yet very powerful and effective way.Legally, the issues are similar to the media law area: intellectual property, ownership, business entities, partnerships that happened by accident. There was once a major case where somebody filed a patent on podcasting technology, but now it’s been resolved. Hopefully, that opens things up for people to start using it as a medium.A marketing tool Because Gordon does the show every month, that

On this episode of the Innovation in Compliance Podcast, we have Patrick Conroy, RegTech Leader and Managing Director at ACA Technology. What does ACA do, what technologies and solutions do they offer, and how can you leverage them to make your compliance programs more strategic, nimble, and proactive? Professional background Patrick shares how he got his start in financial services, to working at the largest global banks in the world, and honing his skills as a compliance practitioner and embracing technology. Through that lens, he started building compliance services and looking at different emerging technologies, as well as focusing on RegTech at the firm. ACA products and services ACA’s solutions are derived from subject matter expertise with tech enablement around it, to help firms develop and architect their overall compliance programs. They focus across a few different verticals: compliance risk, advisory consulting, managed services, education and training, and technology solutions

Can you pick up misconduct signals from a conversation? Joining us today is Brandon Carl, the Vice President of Product Management at Digital Reasoning. He oversees their product portfolio and brings together research, machine learning, and development for their audio analytics and conduct surveillance, and he’s here to share how artificial intelligence can change the way we do compliance.Digital Reasoning SolutionsDigital Reasoning got its start working with government institutions on identifying bad actors. When they shifted over into conduct surveillance, it was a very natural foray into looking for misconduct or bad actors within financial markets. The key behind all these regulations is to instill confidence in people participating in markets and make sure that the market is protected and liquid and that they’re getting fair prices.Finding signals When you take a look at bad actors in general, you tend to find two buckets of people: 1) Negligent bad actors who don’t have bad intentions, but are probably

Why does accounting have to be so complicated? That was the question today’s guest, Ian Crosby, asked himself. And from that question, America’s largest bookkeeping service for small businesses was born. Ian is the co-founder and CEO of Bench, and he’s talking about taking the grounded route to innovation — and how it’s always about the people. Humble (and frustrated) beginningsIan was a bookkeeper in college and came across the problem of: how is there not a place you can just go on the internet and get perfect bookkeeping out? People have to either figure it out themselves, or hire an expert and have no idea if that person is good or doing it right. Why is there no “Gmail for Accounting”? This is a huge problem that’s been overlooked and he couldn’t get the idea out of his head, so he jumped right into it.The Bench brand of business leadership At a surface level, bookkeeping can seem really ‘back office-y,’ but when people get on top of their finances, they get a sense of direction and feel p

Your organization’s ecosystem is probably bigger than you think, and a big ecosystem presents bigger risks. Dan Kinsella is the Extended Enterprise Risk Management Leader at Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory, and today we’re talking about managing these risks across the extended enterprise. The “Extended Enterprise” When we think about our organization, we have to think beyond our four walls: the extended enterprise is everything that we’re connected to in our environment.As businesses, we are leveraging more third parties than we ever have. Our objective is to make our organizations better, cheaper, and faster at driving bottom line improvement, and we can do that by leveraging these third parties in a more consistent and cohesive fashion. Types of extended risksForeign corrupt practices, laws, and regulations around the ability to conduct business globally is one of the top risks that global organizations focus on, and next on the list would be cyber or information technology risks.There are usually a ba

What are you doing to keep your documents secure and your data protected? Today we have Tomas Suros, Chief Solutions Architect, Practice Automation, at AbacusNext. They’ve developed an innovative, all-in-one system for the legal and compliance field that makes work more efficient and more secure. Today we’re learning more about the system and what it can do.Tomas’s background: when law meets techTomas attended law school at the time the internet boom was in full swing, with his classes applying their concepts to the internet, back when it still had no jurisdictional boundaries. Right after graduation, he worked for Pandora, a streaming radio entity and his first experience with the technology of law, and eventually, his interests turned to leveraging technology for compliance and developing software tools for lawyers. AbacusNext: What is it, and how does it work?AbacusNext uses software tools to protect data and give companies efficient access to them through a private cloud environment. Having a private clou

As the web gets more and more complicated, how can we keep up? Keith Laska, a board member at Hanzo, joins us today. Hanzo uses artificial intelligence and modern technology to improve compliance effectiveness. With the web being as dynamic as it is, our compliance solutions have to be, too. The story of HanzoAt Hanzo, they use data science to make their customers’ lives easier, covering both proactive and reactive compliance. But there’s one major difference: they collect, store, and offer insights and analytics on content in a native format instead of the usual plain PDFs. That may sound trivial, but it’s a complicated process. The aim is to preserve the web forever, and static PDFs remove almost all of the dynamic nature of the web. They needed a platform that could capture everything — metadata, JavaScript, videos that could play back — so future generations could have context and provide quality insights and analytics from the content.And that’s how Hanzo was born.What does Hanzo bring into the arena of

As the fraud risk landscape changes, how do you adapt? Today, we have Vince Walden and Matt Galvin. Vince is a Partner with Ernst & Young’s Forensic and Integrity Services Practice, and Matt is the Global Vice President of Ethics & Compliance at Anheuser-Busch InBev. We’re talking about an article Vince has co-authored in Fraud Magazine entitled: Accelerating Anti-Fraud Innovation, as well as innovations that Matt has put forward in his compliance program. What are some of the key reasons for the success of an innovation project in the anti-fraud arena? It’s about measuring compliance effectiveness and finding ways to keep compliance fun, interactive, and top of mind for employees. Putting systems in place so you can see measurable improvements in the quality of transactional data moving through a system is what’s driving a lot of the innovation in compliance. People are beginning to really understand the technologies available to them. What are some of the key reasons for the failure of an innovation

When doing business in a new country, do you know what the bribery risks are? Robert Clark is the Manager of Legal Research at TRACE International, and he’s here to discuss the TRACE Bribery Risk Matrix, an excellent tool for the compliance practitioner, and deep-dive into it and how you can use it — so you don’t get caught unawares.What is the TRACE Bribery Risk Matrix? It’s a tool for assessing bribery risks on a country-by-country basis. Before 2014, the best available resources for doing this were general evaluations of the perception of corruption in each country. This tool is more specific, and does two things distinctively: (1) focuses on business bribery risk, and (2) takes a multi-dimensional view of that risk by looking at a range of factors or domains. What are these domains and how do they work? Opportunity: which is concerned with the direct engagement with public officials in each country. It asks three questions: How much interaction can you expect there to be? The more interactions you ha

Are you using social media to get your message and your practice out there? Gyi Tsakalakis is the co-founder of AttorneySync, an internet marketing agency helping their clients grow their visibility and get in front of their audience. He’s here to share with us his insights around the use of the internet and social media — and why you’re already left behind if you don’t. How do you communicate the values of utilizing social media to your clients?It requires a lot of education because it still faces a lot of skepticism. It’s all about demonstrating that from search, to click, to phone call, to fee, clients will make a return on investment, and grow their social network and referral base. It comes down to those key metrics. Between 25-50% of the audiences Gyi speaks with still don’t have a basic website, and websites really are table stakes.Will a website or social media presence be able to help a general practitioner? It’s a no brainer. One of the challenges is to get out of the mindset of pitting the internet

Innovation can come in many forms: a new product, or a new piece of technology. Today we’re talking about innovation in a process, specifically, mergers and acquisitions. Our guest is Axel Kirstetter, the Vice President for Product Marketing, Content Marketing, and Pricing at Merrill Corporation, here to talk about M&A, and the seven critical M&A transaction mistakes.How does Merrill help companies in the M&A process?They have a virtual data room where clients can put information, content, and data for potential bidders to participate in the due diligence cycle. Bidders, buyers, and sellers worldwide can get together and exchange information via technology that’s compliant and secure. What is Synergy Savings? And what is its importance in the M&A process? In acquisition mergers, you’re combining two entities, and naturally, there will be some overlap between capabilities, production resources, and so forth. You can remove some of these redundancies to achieve Synergy Savings. For any acquisiti

Is the smart contract a key innovation that will change the way we arbitrate agreements? Today on the show we have Jacob Enoch, a partner at M. Firon & Co., to talk to us about smart contracts and the implications for both lawyers and the compliance profession.What is a smart contract?A smart contract is a computer protocol or program intended to facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiations or performance of the contract. There is an emphasis on the automatic performance attributes of a smart contract and the fact that it no longer requires a leap of faith or an element of trust when it comes to dealing with the performance of such a contract. Jacob states that this introduces a shift in the way that contracts usually work.What’s the difference between a smart contract and blockchain?Blockchain is a technology that may be used as a platform for smart contracts, and it’s known for its reliable control of cryptocurrency and attributes that contribute to the certainty of automatic execution, which is at t

“Compliance” and “cinematic” aren’t words you often see together — but for our guest this week, Marc Havener, the pairing makes perfect sense. Marc is a filmmaker and the founder and CEO of Resonate Pictures, a company that produces cinematic training films that stick. Why cinematic training films? On today’s episode Marc shares about his innovative use of storytelling and how he uses it to communicate memorable messages.The divide across filmmaking and compliance trainingThe idea began when Marc’s friend asked him to do training videos in the style of the TV show The Office — which Marc recognized as the spark of creativity that could make communications stick. That experience opened his eyes to the world of corporate training and ethics, and made him realize that the perceived divide across filmmaking and compliance training isn’t all that wide. The heart and essence of filmmaking and storytelling is changing culture, and so it is with compliance training. Embedding a message in a story is the best way

What is blockchain, how does it work, and how can it apply to you? On the show we have Syed Hussain, the Global Chief Commercial Officer of BANKEX, a blockchain-based fintech company from New York City. They have an extraordinarily innovative tool, Securitization 2.0 Operating Systems for Capital Markets, and today, Syed tells us more about blockchain and how it can revolutionize the market.Blockchain: what is it, and why is it so revolutionary? This is the kind of technology that spans across humankind because it operates on two core foundations of human interaction: trust and incentivization. But blockchain technology allows us to make incentives a fungible resource that can be freely traded, facilitated by the trust that is systematically built in. That is, it allows us to digitize our assets  — i.e. anything that holds value, like art, or real estate, or copyrights, or even information — so that it’s freely tradable and traceable. Then, the ‘proof of asset protocol’ allows relevant parties

Today on the show, we have a guest who isn’t your typical compliance professional. Ronnie Feldman is the President and Creative Director at Learnings and Entertainments… and a comedian! Ronnie and his team help clients communicate more effectively through humor and entertainment, and when it comes to a subject as serious as compliance, Ronnie shares that laughter may be the best teacher.Engaging employees with comedyTreating a serious subject seriously is a surefire way to make it boring, pedantic, and to lose your employees’ attention. You have to separate the message from the delivery mechanism. As compliance professionals, employees might dislike or be afraid of you, so there needs to be a friendly and positive way to approach these subjects. Also, a majority of employees don’t think about these issues regularly, if at all, and this is mostly because we aren't communicating effectively. A better approach is to treat the subject matter like advertisers: things like helpline jingles might be weird, but it st