Over the past few years, the financial services sector has undergone a complex regulatory evolution. Even past the usual flow of regulation change and shifting reporting standards, there are two key trends we’ve identified at Fimatix that are driving this, and which put firms at risk of falling behind if not grappled with effectively.
In the first instance, is an ever-growing investor and regulatory demand for ESG-compliance. Throughout the entire lifecycle of a financial product or service, its environmental impact now requires assessing and where possible reducing. Any social benefits, meanwhile, need identifying and enhancing.
Next, upcoming changes to Consumer Duty regulations call for higher and clearer standards of consumer protection across financial services, with the aim of placing the consumer squarely at the centre of financial services offerings.
These are both necessary steps in ‘de-mystifying’ the financial services industry to the increasing numbers of new, and existing consumers – and are also key stepping stones to ensuring consumers have adequate information on which to base their financial decisions. In many cases though, they can require systemic change to do right, and for larger firms in particular, involve the gathering and processing of vast quantities of data.
This is where Fimatix are playing a key role supporting firms to meet demand from for ESG-compliant financial products with it’s sector leading Prodigy solution – a tool that enables users to collate data and apply process controls to get full governance insight, across the entire span of a product or service’s existence. Our approach on implementing Prodigy has seen us partner with global leaders, including the financial services giant Aon.
A key feature of our vision for Prodigy is to make it adaptable to add value across sectors and jurisdictions. We do this via a data template system, where a library of templates provides users with a toolkit to filter data as required to support their regulatory focuses.
This means we can operate with concurrent product design, build and management processes, each with their own specific data templates, to cover product ranges and jurisdictions. We can develop new templates where needed, for instance in assisting firms wishing to manage and evidence their adherence to new Consumer Duty rules.
The period of economic uncertainty we are living through doesn’t look like it’ll be over any time soon. Politics and society continue to be faced with increasingly polarised worldviews, where the upper hand can shift from one to another in a comparatively short space of time.
This inevitably filters through to the world of business, giving those who are able to act with confidence, agility and information the advantage. Prodigy is one tool we hope can have such an effect, helping to mobilise the financial services sector for clean and resilient growth.
By Steve Wise