Chris Ansara, CEO of UK-based Regtech startup docStribute and Chair, Phil Shelley, have shared their career insights on the necessity of digital transformation in order to meet FCA regulations as well as decarbonize global business.
As many sectors struggle to meet regulatory demands, particularly financial services, ensuring that their working practices are cost and time effective, and reducing carbon use is a real challenge.
docStribute claims that it answers that challenge by enabling companies to streamline business practice, abide by regulation, and reduce their carbon footprint simultaneously.
Customer communication in the financial services sector is becoming more complex due to new, additional regulation. The UK FCA’s new consumer duty package – that comes into place July 2023 – will put more pressure on banks, asset managers and other regulated financial services providers to prove that they are acting in the best interests of their customers.
docStribute supports financial service companies by helping them comply with the new consumer duty requirements. They provide fast, secure communication powered by Distributed Ledger Technology. This provides timely communication with a customer experience that removes the barriers to prompt interaction and maximises the chance of full and timely understanding.
By utilizing docStribute’s service, firms can ensure they deliver documents instantaneously and provide an audit trail as evidence, thus complying with FCA consumer duty regulations. docStribute removes the need for postage, the hassle of email, and the lack of security of PDF, all whilst using technology that is cost-effective and sustainable. By providing easy to use access to documents and intuitive interaction, docStribute promotes digital customer relationships, even for financial services products which require infrequent dialogue.
Our conversation with Chris Ansara and Phil Shelley is shared below.
Crowdfund Insider: What led you to docStribute?
Chris Ansara: I spent time in advertising and worked with brands including Coca-Cola, Adidas, and McDonald’s. These companies were at the forefront of digital interaction with their customers. But when I turned my attention to the financial services sector, it was clear that the requirement for communication using a durable medium was hugely limiting their digital dialogue.
Through this experience, I witnessed how the digital delivery of sensitive documents and contracts is extremely heavily regulated, complicated, and very expensive, often resulting in financial institutions regressing to the outdated and carbon-heavy practice of distributing printed documents. But this is costly, slow and results in huge amounts of paper waste. Myself and my co-founders noticed these issues with the way financial institutions communicate with their customers, and knew there must be a better way.
Phil Shelley: I was part of UBS financial services, working in Corporate Broking and Equity Capital markets for 15 years, culminating as Head of Corporate Broking. I then joined Goldman Sachs, leading the Corporate Broking and Equity Capital Markets team before joining Barclays as Vice Chairman of the Investment Bank.
After working at the top end of the financial services sector for many years, I could see the challenges that the industry was facing with a clear requirement to move financial services communication into the truly digital age, but with regulation that often made it hard to do so.
After getting to know the docStribute team I realised that their combination of Distributed Ledger Technology and simple hyper-links to documents was a great foundation to create a step change in digital communication. I also thought I could bring a lot to the table as docStribute built its technology, routes to market and use cases.
Crowdfund Insider: There is increasing pressure on firms due to the new FCA consumer duty regulations. How can docStribute help to alleviate this pressure?
Chris: A key part of the new consumer duty regulations is making sure customers receive information in a timely manner. Through using distributed ledger technology, docStribute enables business to be conducted with the highest level of efficiency and transparency.
According to regulations, documents must remain unchanged upon delivery (‘Durable Medium’) and the financial institution cannot modify those terms and conditions. While there are ways to achieve this, such as sending a PDF, many firms avoid using attachments in emails due to security risks. Another option, HTML emails, is problematic from a customer understanding perspective. Consequently, the industry has shifted towards portals. However, according to the new consumer duty regulations, banks will no longer be allowed to merely push information into an app and consider that adequate customer communication.
If a company sends out documents to apps knowing that they are not being read and are subsequently deleted, they are failing to meet their consumer duty obligations. Apps retain information for long periods of time, however, many of the messages often go unread and financial institutions fail to fulfil their regulatory requirement to communicate with the customer.
To solve this problem, docStribute helps these institutions deliver documents directly into the customer’s inbox in a way that can be securely stored for as long as necessary. This ensures that the document is secure, easy to read and can be revisited by the customer, in direct compliance with new FCA regulations.
Crowdfund Insider: How do docStribute’s products help firms comply with the FCA consumer duty regulations?
Chris: We offer a product called dSend, which centres around consumer duty and understanding. dSend enables the distribution of documents in a way that complies with the new FCA consumer duty regulations. Many documents are tightly regulated and dSend enables documents to be sent using immutable hyperlinks. These are completely secure and can be shared by email, SMS and instant messaging.
dSend is particularly useful in regulated industries such as the financial and legal sectors where it is vital that all shared documents have the highest security and meet regulatory requirements. For example, in finance, the ‘durable medium rule’ dictates that there can be no discrepancy between how documents are sent versus what is in the content, ensuring the document remains unchanged upon delivery. dSend helps firms achieve this without compromising on security and concision.
docStribute encrypts the documents using an algorithm, generating an alphanumeric key. This key is linked to a ledger and when the end user clicks on the link, the key is validated against the consensus of multiple nodes on the ledger. Once a link is sent to a customer, it cannot be changed due to the consensus mechanism. The uniqueness of the key guarantees the document (the content of which cannot be altered once sent). By distributing the key to the ledge, a consensus is established, reinforcing the document’s integrity.
Crowdfund Insider: What is unique about docStribute’s offering?
Phil: docStribute is unique in that we ensure documents are distributed in a way that is in compliance with regulations, whilst also cutting a company’s costs and carbon footprint. We are lucky enough to have formed some wonderful partnerships, such as with Salesforce, the UK Government’s Crown Commercial Service (CCS) to be listed as a G-Cloud 13 supplier, as well as Mia Platform Marketplace and Penrith Building Society.
We are also unique in the fact that our safe, secure, digital signing tool, dSign, is available to companies of all sizes and is built around the needs of SMEs in particular, democratizing the digital signature by making all features available for all sectors at a single, low cost, flat fee with no hidden costs.
dSign is a safe and secure digital signing tool, providing an easy and intuitive solution to inefficient and unsustainable physical signing. dSign offers users the solution of legally binding digital signatures which reduces turnaround time by 80%, enabling business to be conducted faster, more securely and in a more environmentally-friendly way.
We want all companies regardless of size or value to be able to utilise our digital signing technology and have made sure to make all of its benefits available to everyone with our fair pricing, with no hidden costs or sneaky upgrades required. According to Harvard Business Review research, as much as 21% of a salesperson’s time is taken up by admin. docStribute directly responds to these issues, providing a new way, a better way, to conduct business.
Furthermore, delivering documents using paper is costly, and results in masses of paper waste. docStribute’s solutions are financially beneficial for all our clients, whilst also helping them to reduce carbon. When implemented, our solution reduces CO2 emissions by 80% when compared to the use of PDFs or HTML, and even further when compared to paper.
But if you combine the two, we can provide a complete digital customer communication capability. It manages the challenges of Durable Medium and Consumer Duty Regulation by being fast, interactive, direct and above all a great customer experience.