An Australian law firm today launched a world-first ‘cloud-based platform’ to help financial services institutions manoeuvre through the impending tsunami of mandatory reporting practices designed to identify regulatory breach issues.
National firm Gadens today unveiled the easy-to-use platform to help financial sector firms comply with the myriad overlapping and time-sensitive mandatory reporting regimes to be met by 5 October this year.
Brisbane-based Gadens Director Liam Hennessy said mandatory reporting of potential regulatory issues had become a great concern for financial services organisations already struggling to manage the volume of information, time and resourcing pressure, and legal complexity of these sensitive issues.
With the introduction of at least seven overlapping and time-sensitive mandatory reporting regimes to directly affect the financial services sector by 5 October, organisations were gearing up to consider how they can best prepare for, and respond to, the changes.
Mr Hennessy said new mandatory reporting practices were intended to expose potential regulatory breach issues such as fee miscalculations, deficient consumer advice or cyber-attacks.
In a bid to solve these issues, Gadens had created a cloud-based RegTech platform which streamlines the information collation, assessment and reporting process of potential regulatory issues to one online platform, allowing financial services institutions across the country to ensure defensible, timely and cost-effective compliance with the new and newly important regimes, including BEAR/FAR, ADI, AFSL and ACL obligations, AML/CTF, Privacy and Design & Distribution.
Mr Hennessy said the platform – called Gadens Breach Manager – was a user-friendly platform, protected from cyber, legal privilege and server standpoints, and designed to be cost-effective.
“Regulatory reporting regimes in the Australian financial services industry are rapidly becoming more onerous in an attempt to regulate and improve culture, with liability for getting it wrong judgmentally or timing-wise,” he said.
“We designed the Gadens Breach Manager to allow time-pressed clients to efficiently gather the right information in a protected environment, assess which of seven overlapping regimes the potential issue may fall under within statutory timeframes, and then get advice free-of-charge in-house or for a low fixed price externally.
“The client or platform user is in complete control from an audit perspective and may elect to customise the platform for their internal needs.
“We are solving an efficiency, regulatory risk and cost problem for clients and an external users.”
Gadens Breach Manager complies with strict industry reporting requirements and ensures quality legal advice is obtained on whether a regulatory breach has occurred (and, if so, preparation of the regulatory report itself) and what to do next within statutory timeframes, reducing the risk of legal ramifications for financial services organisations and their senior accountable employees.
Gadens Chairman Paul Spiro said organisations needed to seriously consider how they would prepare for, and respond to, the impending changes. He noted that the Australian Securities and Investments Commission has been investing in greater technology around this space, and the private sector needed to do the same to keep up.
Powered and hosted externally by Australian legal technology company Lawcadia, Gadens Breach Manager uses an intelligent and secure platform engine – Lawcadia Intelligence™ – supported by an ISO 27001-certified information security management system accepted by many large organisations.
Mr Hennessy said the latest initiative complemented Gadens’ existing technology offering, including Gadens Portfolio Solutions (a suite of online business-to-business programs, legal analysis and management tools), Gadens’ NUIX (Ringtail)/Relativity managed discovery offering (which adopts ‘technology assisted review’ to reduce lawyer hours on document reviews), and e-contracts/e-signing programs developed during COVID-19.
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