By 
All around the world, regulators are increasingly reforming and introducing new individual accountability regimes to help strengthen market integrity and ensure financial services employees are fit and proper to carry out their roles. However, firms can often find it challenging to meet the requirements laid out in legislation without the right tools to track and keep an accurate accountability trail for both internal and external purposes.
While market solutions exist to help strengthen the individual accountability of employees and effectively demonstrate a firm’s compliance to regulators, it’s vital that they are tailored to the specifics of each regime to be fit for purpose. If not, it becomes difficult to ascertain whether you have taken the necessary steps to meet your obligations. This is especially true when regulators introduce a new regime – such as the Financial Accountability Regime (FAR) Bill 2023 of Australia, which was recently passed in September.
The introduction of FAR has meant that entities in the banking, insurance and superannuation industries now have the challenge of adjusting their responsibility and accountability frameworks when it replaces the Banking Executive Accountability Regime (BEAR). For firms looking to tackle this with the help of third-party providers, a key consideration is to look at each vendor's track record across other global individual accountability regimes.
THE GUIDING LIGHT FOR INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTABILITY COMPLIANCE
Star was the first vendor to provide a suite of compliance software solutions that support and simplify compliance with the UK FCA’s Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SMCR) in 2016 through its Individual Accountability Regime (IAR) solution. Since then, we have gone on to deliver nearly twenty iterations of our product, each containing many enhancements – for each, listening to client feedback to help them become future-ready and more effectively navigate any changes in regulatory demands.
The capabilities of our IAR product were expanded further in 2021 to meet the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Individual Accountability and Conduct (IAC) Guidelines. And most recently, the flexibility of the STAR platform has enabled us to deliver another dedicated solution for Ireland’s Individual Accountability Framework (IAF) – including the Senior Executive Accountability Regime (SEAR) – which will come into force in Dec 2023 for Certification and Conduct, and Jul 2024 for SEAR.
When it comes to FAR, we’ve already built all of the capabilities to help firms establish and maintain a framework to comply with confidence, including:
- Registrations
- Accountability Maps
- Accountability Statements
- Reasonable Steps
- Delegation of Responsibilities
- Breaches and Breach Reporting
- Fit and Proper Assessments
The depth and breadth of our offering is second to none, and has been combined with outstanding knowledge from our subject matter experts (SMEs), who are dedicated to helping firms understand their obligations with global accountability regimes. Over the years, significant investment has also been poured into our IAR solutions, and we have a fully-packed roadmap of continual improvements and enhancements to offer even more innovation and efficiencies to our clients and the market.
With Star’s accountability and competency solutions, firms are not only able to streamline complete and confident compliance with global individual accountability regimes, but drive enterprise-wide professionalism to help foster a culture of compliance that protects and builds the firm’s reputation.
