Compliance – it’s what happens next that matters
Jinfo Blog

19th June 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Just because a financial services firm uses social networking to promote a product, it can’t assume that the communication is an ‘image advertisement’ and therefore exempt from the rules. New guidance from the United Kingdom regulator the Financial Services Authority (FSA) makes clear that companies need to think carefully about whether new media are suitable for plugging complex financial products (http://digbig.com/5bbtdk). The FSA has also chimed in recently in support of Office of Fair Trading guidance on terms and conditions, saying that suppliers shouldn’t even ask customers whether they have read and understood them because they’re highly unlikely to have done so (http://digbig.com/5bbtdm). Whether directly connected or not, this follows a situation earlier this year in which an online game seller inserted a prank clause into its Terms & Conditions on which not one customer clicked (see Out-Law at http://digbig.com/5bbtdn for the details). The FSA is to be broken up under proposals announced recently by Britain’s finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne (widely covered – see for example the BBC at http://digbig.com/5bbtdp). So expect even more regulatory pronouncements from it over the next couple of years as it attempts to carve out its place in history before its demise in 2012. Expect, too, correspondingly febrile activity among providers of regulatory compliance information. Penny Crossland reported recently, for example, on Thomson Reuters’ acquisition of Complinet, confirming that this was a hot topic at the moment and drawing attention to competitors in the field (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29303). Thomson Reuters has also recently launched what it calls ‘a complete Web Disclosure solution for regulatory news announcements’. It uses web-based self-publishing to provide control of the press release process from creation to distribution, with analytics and reporting tools allowing companies to measure impact, monitor coverage and understand market sentiment across traditional and social media (http://digbig.com/5bdxsh). Of course, as Thomson Reuters points out, it actually works for managing any type of corporate press release, not just those in fulfilment of regulatory requirements – but it’s significant that it’s the regulatory applications that it chooses to emphasise. And the same could be said of Autonomy’s recent acquisition of CA Technologies Information Governance (http://digbig.com/5bbtdr). Autonomy provides a single platform for effective records management for any purpose. But its snapping up of a service specifically designed for capturing and managing messages in response to corporate and regulatory requirements further supports Penny Crossland’s observation that compliance information is where the action is. But what matters as far as bosses are concerned is outcomes – what such systems will need to be able to deliver now and, crucially, in the future. As the recent FSA pronouncements illustrate, for information managers keeping track of product and service developments is only half the equation.

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