Building on decades of experience in banking, investment management, compliance and technology, the founders of RiskSave are able to offer businesses new and mature a plug-and-play regulatory solution. From advisory firms to wealth managers, crowd-funding platforms to robo-advisers, RiskSave Compliance can offer a tailored solution that will allow you the fastest route to market in the regulated industries. Following are the excerpts from the interview with Risksave CEO, Dan Tammas-Hastings.
How do you define the term RegTech?
RegTech is a sub-class of FinTech, and concerns the use of technology to create efficiencies in financial services for issues regarding regulatory reporting and compliance. It’s become increasingly important since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) as the need for accurate reporting has risen dramatically just as financial services have been cutting costs / workforces.
Who are the critical players in your journey to build the RegTech company?
We’re small but growing, and seeking to hire across a number of fields including technology compliance and innovation. We are opening a second office in Edinburgh to cope with the demand, we’ve had critical support from the founding team, our first collaborative client relationships and an active and well informed investor base.
Brief overview about your product/service offering?
RiskSave have a number of products across technology and innovation. RiskSave has a regulatory incubator and Appointed Representative Service. By using our FCA umbrella and compliance expertise, our clients are able to provide financial services to all clients across Europe much faster than previously. Our RegTech means we can now offer sophisticated compliance services to both FinTechs and more traditional asset managers.
We’ve also created a Risk Reporting and analytics platform, and are helping a number of clients meet their regulatory obligations around PRIIPs KID. We provide an end-to-end solution including multiple modules all of which can be accessed separately. These include proxy construction, where appropriate, total cost calculations, scenario analysis and single risk indicator calculations.
What inspired you to build the above product?
Having worked in startups for a while, we found a lot of pain points trying to launch new products. We found that our solutions were better than those commercially available, so sought to help other FinTechs with some of their operational burden.
Your concept BRIC is a very unique one. What do you think makes Blockchain technology unique ? What is the future of Blockchain and what are the various challenges that come along with it?
As crypto currencies and funding models such as ICOs and tokenization have entered the mainstream. RiskSave were seeing more and more innovative and disruptive businesses emerge that are built around DLT. The business models built on these technologies have escaped detailed financial regulation, as regulation will usually occur with a lag to innovation.
RiskSave are proud to offer partnership with businesses operating in this area, where we collaborate to develop future-proofed policies and processes so that they are ready for any changes the regulators introduce.
What are the recent advancements in Block-chain in Regtech Domain?
Blockchain based solutions are still finding investment and attracting regulatory scrutiny. Tokenised platforms have yet to get the traction that the community was prediciting (or hoping for) but the debate will become louder with FaceBook’s ‘interesting’ move into the area.
Although the Libra product is neither a cryptocurrency nor blockchain dependent in our view.
Where do you see yourself in next three years?
In the last three years RiskSave have moved from being a specialised (although Digital) asset manager, to a provider of compliance and regulation expertise, winning numerous awards in Compliance and RegTech. We’ve also moved from a money losing tech startup, to a profitable compliance firm, which was nice, but somewhat unexpected. The next three will presumably be more constant, but we are scaling across business lines and expect our growth to continue.
Which countries do you feel you can expand to with your offerings?
We’ve always been based in London, the home of fintech and regtech, but our new Scottish Base in Edinburgh will expand our offering and client base. Our expertise in European legislation such as GDPR and MIFID means that we can cover clients across Europe.
