Financial Services Compliance
Understanding and assessing compliance risk is an imperative requirement in today’s complex regulatory landscape. Whilst there are many tools available to assist a business in achieving its objectives, the overriding principle remains - can it be done?
Whilst there may be a compelling business case to proceed, it is essential to ensure that there are no regulatory impediments from achieving these objectives.
Ariel & Associates is a boutique consulting company providing specialist advice covering business compliance. We specialise in providing our services to clients in the SME sector. Generally, our clients do not have the resources to maintain a dedicated in-house compliance department. For them, compliance obligations constitute a disproportionate amount of time owing to the complexity of the legislative and regulatory requirements they are faced with.
Ariel & Associates can provide you with tailored and effective compliance solutions which are not only practical and sensible, but will reduce the cost burden on your business. These solutions will be designed to ensure that you are not acting contrary to any laws, rules, principles or codes of conduct.
Specifically, we can assist you with you compliance requirements in the following ways:
Being appointed your outsourced compliance service provider.
Drafting compliance manuals or other procedures and policies.
Undertaking a compliance health check or review of the operations and activities of your business.
Undertaking specific testing and monitoring of certain compliance issues.
- Providing independent compliance advisory services.
At Ariel & Associates, we do not simply provide you with a document and expect it to magically deliver compliance results. A properly documented compliance manual, or similarly functioning document, should be one part of an entity’s compliance procedures. Just as important is the ongoing monitoring of compliance with the entity’s ratified documented processes and procedures.
Depending on your current compliance requirements, we would be delighted in providing you with a proposal which would suit your needs. Ideally, Ariel & Associates would like to partner with you and grow with your business over the long term.
With the growing trend for governments to protect the interests of consumers (especially retail clients), regulators are using their powers to undertake audits, reviews and/or inspections of licensees. Usually they will provide you with reasonable notice, but they do have the right to appear unannounced. Therefore, you need to be prepared! You will need to demonstrate that you are not acting contrary to any legislative or regulatory requirements.
So, taking into account the powers available to the regulators (fines, suspensions, bannings, revocation of AFSL), financial service providers should not be questioning the cost of compliance, but rather the cost of non-compliance. Good compliance is essential for the ongoing viability of your business and a culture of compliance needs to be embraced from the Board of directors down throughout all levels of the company.
We are happy to discuss outsourcing your compliance function to Ariel & Associates, or alternatively, we can provide you with the requisite services required to complement your compliance management to ensure you continue to comply with your compliance obligations.
Our aim, at Ariel & Associates, is to provide our clients with the necessary compliance systems to provide comfort and assuredness to an entity’s board of directors, senior management, members and other stakeholders, that action has been implemented to mitigate business risk and exposure.