In conversation with TechGraph, Sandeep Agrawal, Director & Co-founder of TeamLease Regtech, discusses how their innovative product suite ensures compliance and simplifies regulatory management for businesses.
Read the complete interview:
TechGraph: How does TeamLease Regtech help corporates stay on the right side of the law?
Sandeep Agrawal: TeamLease RegTech’s product offerings assist corporates create a robust process around Compliance Management and build transparency amongst top management by facilitating real-time status updates for all applicable compliances.
Our product, AVACOM covers all Central, State, and Local laws in India and supports the organization in creating a formal structure of reporting and accountability across the organization. Once configured, the product assists in timely reminders and escalations to the relevant stakeholders well before compliance obligations creates a digital central repository of all compliance paperwork, updates the compliance owners with relevant regulatory changes within 48 hours of the publication, provides a variety of management reports to facilitate timely decision making, etc. These among many other features of the product help the organization shift from person-dependent to process-oriented flow and thereby stay on the right side of the law.
TechGraph: How do corporates mitigate compliance risks with the help of TeamLease RegTech?
Sandeep Agrawal: India’s regulatory environment is very complex and the cost of non-compliance is higher than compliance. Compliance risks can materialize in multiple ways; organizations are not aware of the applicable compliances; in cases, they do not have a formal compliance organogram; in cases, they do not adopt a methodical way of managing compliance across the organization. These are some of the most common reasons for non-compliance.
TeamLease Regtech helps organizations mitigate the above risks with compliance applicability assessments (thereby providing a list of all applicable compliances) and a tech-enabled platform (automating the compliance management process). The platform helps top management focus on critical/high-risk compliances which may severely impact the company’s reputation and/or stability.
With automatic advance reminders for compliance obligations, non-compliance or compliance delays are avoided. Intuitive dashboards and graphical reports help compare compliance performance entity-wise, location-wise, and user-wise and help with quick decision-making.
TechGraph: How does TeamLease Regtech ensure that its clients are up-to-date with changes in regulatory requirements in various industries and sectors?
Sandeep Agrawal: We routinely comb through more than 2,233 websites belonging to Government ministries, departments, and regulatory entities and publish all compliance and regulatory updates.
Every change in compliance requirements, from the revision of deadlines, duty structures, penalties, forms, and formats of filings, returns, and challans among others, is tracked and collated for our compliance solutions. All changes are tracked in real-time and updated within 24 hours of publication.
TechGraph: What specific measures does TeamLease Regtech take to ensure data privacy and security, particularly in light of recent high-profile data breaches?
Sandeep Agrawal: The in-house technology team at TL RegTech consists of experts in technology infrastructure and security. As an organization, we have adopted the latest technological practices to ensure security and availability. Business Continuity Plans (BCP) and Disaster Recovery Plans (DRP) have been put in place along with fully encrypted platforms (covering data at rest and in motion with AES 256-bit symmetric encryption).
A variety of other internal activities are performed to manage security daily. These activities include designing network infrastructure to manage DDOS attacks and implementing web application firewalls among others. Furthermore, third-party security experts (such as CERT-IN-certified firms) conduct periodic reviews of all platforms, and we have also obtained global IT Security certification (SOC II).
TechGraph: How does TeamLease Regtech ensure that its clients are all aware of and trained on compliance policies and procedures?
Sandeep Agrawal: TeamLease RegTech provides its clients with a dedicated support and training team composed of legal and technology experts. As soon as a client is onboarded, the support team handholds them and trains them on how to use the compliance management system. A thorough assessment of applicable compliances, along with a risk assessment of all pending compliances is done.
This helps the clients identify and understand areas that need attention. Compliance teams are provided with training and support materials and ongoing support to address any issues that may arise. Compliance teams are trained in every aspect of the compliance management platform to help them adapt and effectively use the software for managing their compliance processes.
TechGraph: How does TeamLease RegTech help its Clients in managing contractor and third-party vendor compliance?
Sandeep Agrawal: In India, businesses/principal employers monitor vendor compliance. Most of the time the 3rd Parties / Vendors are small in size and have a limited understanding of compliance obligations.
Additionally, due to the size of the 3rd Parties / Vendors hired, organizations find it very difficult to keep track of the compliance status of each vendor. Managing it over emails and Excel spreadsheet is tedious and prone to errors.
Our 3rd Party Compliance Management Product is designed to support organizations manage this life cycle and makes the overall process more effective, comprehensive, and transparent.
The product facilitates access to Vendor representatives for easy flow of data/documents supported by to and fro communication between the 02 organizations. Apart from the centralized compliance document repository, the product also provides intuitive dashboards and detailed Excel-based reports for real-time status updates.
TechGraph: Looking ahead, how does TeamLease Regtech plan to evolve its compliance offerings to stay ahead of emerging regulatory trends and requirements?
Sandeep Agrawal: Technology has always meant to simplify activities but in the last couple of decades, tech-driven innovations have changed the way we do our day-to-day chores. AI/ML innovations have either made activities simpler or eliminated human intervention.
Along similar lines, we have been investing heavily in end-to-end automation for compliance as well which includes the automatic generation of compliance documents with minimal or no manual inputs and facilitating straight-through filings via APIs.
As of today, our automation layer assists organizations in automatically generating compliance documents. Further, we have been working on creating automation layers for SEBI compliance document generation.
Additionally, we have been writing to various Central and State authorities about the implementation of a digital ecosystem for RegTech players. This will facilitate the seamless filing of regulatory returns via the registered vendors’ platform.
All of the above activities will facilitate end-to-end compliance automation and in turn, significantly reduce compliance costs for organizations and increase compliance accuracy with minimal manual intervention.