In an interaction with Mamta Maity, indiainfoline.com, Mr. Brij Mohandas, Director, Infomatics said ''Traditionally, Infomatics has long been known within the financial industry. When we began our journey, we were pioneers in the data processing business associated with the financial intermediaries for their cash management operations, depository services, and other operations allied to cash management.''

Challenges Compliance Teams in Financial Intermediaries face in managing a wide range of compliance processes and solutions to that.

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Every organization has a compliance team that performs a variety of tasks. In firms such as financial intermediaries and non-bank financial companies, compliance teams oversee a number of areas

1. Developing and implementing risk awareness related programs
2. Creating and Managing internal as well as external compliance policies and procedures
3. Managing regulatory filings and reporting
4. Identifying compliance issues and addressing them

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Globalization and digitization have increased the challenges of managing compliance. Compliance with regulatory requirements has continuously changed and evolved over the past few decades. It is also the compliance team's responsibility to maintain good governance and be compliant with regulatory requirements that instill confidence in different stakeholders such as regulators, market participants, and shareholders.

Here are a few tips that will help in managing compliance processes easier.

1. Automation and digitization are the two ways to make sure that employees and board members receive continuous training, tracking, and monitoring.
2. An automatic regulatory reporting calendar, as well as a data collection process for report generation, would greatly reduce compliance teams' burden of manually collating data.
3. Review of compliance policies and processes on a continuous basis for ongoing improvements.

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How automation can help ease the compliance process for Financial Intermediaries, NBFCS, and Mutual Fund houses

Compliance teams in any organization must ensure regulators are satisfied by providing timely and accurate reports on their compliance requirements. SEBI and RBI each require organizations to process and submit many types of reports on their financial position and operations on a monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, and annual basis. Occasionally, ad hoc reports are required as an additional measure of vigilance.

Following the COVID era disruption and recovery, people have been functioning from remote locations with little human interaction, making it challenging to develop and implement risk-related programs, manage regulatory reporting and filing, and resolve compliance issues.

However, organizations that have adapted to automation and digitization of their compliance processes have proved that despite prevailing challenges it is possible to ensure tracking, monitoring, reporting and even training employees on corporate risk & governance.

Hence the key to overriding any future disruption is to constantly look at gaps in your compliance processes that can be automated and not leave to chance for human intervention when automation could have saved your day.

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How does automation software help Financial Intermediaries ensure the Prohibition of Insider Trading?

Tracking and Prohibition of Insider Trading is an integral part of compliance in SEBI-regulated financial institutions, as well as all publicly traded companies. SEBI is constantly strengthening its regulations to prevent insider trading. On its own, manually managing these regulations can be extremely time-consuming and prone to human errors, but must be closely tracked by the compliance team. Therefore, compliance can largely benefit from softwares that can automate processes that do the following

1. Inform management of risk in real-time
2. Increase reporting accuracy, especially in calculation errors
3. Enhance transparency at every stage, enabling the compliance team to track and record decisions more easily
4. Enables them to spend more time on strategic tasks instead of mundane and standardized tasks.
5. Reducing the possibility of data manipulation and enhancing audit transparency
6. Streamlines reports and provides dashboards to facilitate decision-making.

In today's digital world, fraud detection and reduction would be difficult without automation in processes and systems. Compliance officers, especially those within a Financial Intermediary space, should emphasize automating and adopting the Prevention of Insider Trading systems.

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How technological advancement is speeding up the process to prevent Insider trading?

Technological advancement has meant that it is easy for people to connect with other people and do fraudulent activities including insider trading. Thus, a Compliance officer should be equally empowered with technological enhancements in the tracking process to keep himself/ herself on pace with the offenders.

To detect insider training was traditionally a manual and laborious process, which involved sifting through trading records and employee data to try to find anyone who possessed confidential information that could be valuable for trading. It is technology, specifical software with built-in workflows, that is critical to helping you monitor and control insider trading.

As a result of advances in AI and machine learning, there are algorithms that can sift through emails, instant messages, and other communications for red flags that indicate fraud. However, insider trading detection can't operate in isolation; it must be combined with robust and current governance and compliance workflow systems to ensure that any irregularities are compared with the existing access lists and corporate records. An end-to The-end process plan along with necessary tools are essential for controlling insider trading in this situation.

At the end of the day, technology cannot replace the human element of surveillance but can and will support compliance strategies. Therefore, employees need to be trained on evolving best practices and risks. Training and technological backup can work together to allow teams to spend more time mitigating the real risks.

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Breakpoints in compliance that automation can resolve

Being compliant with the regulations and staying on top to ensure corporate governance involves collecting, collating, processing, and analyzing data to get meaningful insights. More processes and the data required to be processed make it a much more complex proposition. Many organizations are now moving towards automation that helps their compliance in achieving

1. Centralized Data repository of all relevant Information
2. Automation of Workflows and Policy configurations
3. Connecting all stakeholders like Compliance Team, Normal Employees, Key employees as well as the board of directors with the central platform
4. Automated tracking of compliance breaches as well as corrective measures
5. Automation of Internal MIS reporting, Alerts, and Notifications

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Infomatics contribution in the BFSI sector.

Traditionally, Infomatics has long been known within the financial industry. When we began our journey, we were pioneers in the data processing business associated with the financial intermediaries for their cash management operations, depository services, and other operations allied to cash management.

Over the course of our journey, the company started developing software solutions based on our knowledge and experience in supporting our customers. In today's BFSI industry, Trillium® and Velox® are trusted brands. With close to 50+ highly regarded companies with whom we are associated, we have continuously evolved to be their premier product-led solutions partner.

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