StarCompliance: Compliance Made Simple and Easy

Tim Ward, Director of Product Strategy and Marketing

The company’s second product, Compliance Control Room, allows firms to manage compliance activities related to large financial transactions such as mergers and acquisitions, debt offerings, major investments, and IPOs. The product primarily targeted at investment banks, large diversified financial firms, and private equity firms manages all record-keeping related to deals, performs automated conflict searches, and provides a range of productivity tools for compliance control room analysts. Compliance Control Room increases efficiency for control rooms by providing efficient centralized workflows for control room analysts and deal team members to capture, review, and record all compliance-related aspects of a deal as it progresses through the full deal life cycle.

The added advantages are that Compliance Control Room integrates with other key enterprise systems to provide 2-way communication between compliance and relevant business line systems. Furthermore, the Compliance Control Room increases the capability for control rooms to spot and address possible deal conflicts earlier in the life cycle and with more accuracy. To enable data analytics, data from employee activity and deal activity is collected, organized, and made available from a consolidated data warehouse. “Ultimately, this data can be used to identify, assess, and address compliance risk and increase the efficiency of the compliance team,” states Ward.

StarCompliance has a consistent history of providing exemplary services to its clients. In an implementation highlight, a global diversified banking group with 60,000 employees and operating across 25 different countries was going through a significant organizational restructuring due to a spin-off and had to replace all the enterprise systems, including their compliance technology products. Post the implementation of StarCompliance’s products, Employee Conflicts of Interest and Compliance Control Room, the client experienced manifold benefits. “Understanding information is key to managing it, and you can’t do that from spreadsheets anymore. MNPI must be captured. Data safely stored. Records kept and audit trails maintained. Good reporting is critical. The software must be easy to use and integrate with. These were our must-haves,” says this leading bank’s Head of Control Room. The STAR Platform consolidated all of the relevant employee data that was previously distributed across various in-house applications into a single platform. This provided employees with a single portal to report their compliance-related personal activity. In addition, the STAR Platform allowed the client to migrate many manual processes onto the platform and increased the automation of reviews against pre-defined rule sets. Star’s single consolidated compliance portal helped the client to launch the new centralized compliance program for the new entity and brought together diverse sets of employees and compliance teams.

StarCompliance has strengthened its position in the industry through continuous investment and innovation. It’s remarkable that this year alone, they have developed a mobile application, made a data warehouse, developed a supervisory dashboard, and a comprehensive API framework. Nevertheless, their ultimate goal is to provide their clients with an excellent client experience from the very first engagement. It comes as no surprise that the retention rate for StarCompliance is almost 99 percent and amongst the highest in the industry.

The company’s roadmap includes continuous investment in its products and seeking opportunities to add value to their existing products and solve new compliance challenges. “We have users in over 83 countries. We foresee opening offices in additional major financial centers to serve our new customers,” says Jennifer. StarCompliance will continue to increase the utility of the data they collect and store on behalf of their clients, and further investigate new techniques for increasing analytical capabilities without compromising personal privacy principles. Jennifer sums it up by saying, “In our quest to make compliance simple and easy, we strive to enhance the user experience for employees to increase engagement and reduce the time it takes to complete common tasks while equipping compliance officers with the right tools to increase automation and decision support.”