Perry Robinson
President & CEOAbout the author
The Background
Last month, a customer of RocketDocs, which happens to be a large multinational bank notified us they were moving business with us to another company. This was a surprise for us. I had met with this customer recently, and all seemed to be going well. It turns out that the bank was going through cost cutting measures, that our primary contact was leaving and that they had consolidated parts of the business. The new leader was using an alternative solution to ours and they decided it was easier to move the business to them.
This was obviously disappointing. No one likes to lose a good customer. It was confusing. We asked who they were moving to, and the provider is one that we all know well enough. They are in the same space, but we do not consider them a competitor because they lack key capabilities needed to support this bank’s regulatory record keeping obligations.
What RocketDocs Does Different
You see, RocketDocs is a specialist. We provide knowledge management solutions that enable businesses to answer qualifying questionnaires that are critically relied on by their clients when they make decisions about who to invest with or who to do business with. What RocketDocs does is quite simple: enable businesses to create and maintain approved content for use in making vital representations made in the sales process. How we do this is quite complex, and is the result of thirty years of work in the space. The regulations that govern our customers are also very complex.
Serving businesses in financial services, healthcare, life sciences, insurance and other highly regulated areas, there are a multitude of regulations. They vary by industry and by country. Effectively, these businesses are obligated to maintain records of certain representations they make either by contract or regulation or both. Over the thirty years, RocketDocs has built a system that enables our customers to answer questionnaires and to create marketing materials while simultaneously acting as a system of record on their behalf.
What Happened With The Bank
Back to the bank customer. Upon hearing of their decision, we asked them what they wanted to do with the data to remain in compliance with the regulations. A couple of days passed, and they came back with a somewhat surprising answer: Nothing.
This bank was ready to have all of the data supporting their compliance over nearly a decade deleted, even the data that was still subject to their 5 year requirements. A quick inquiry into Google provided some insight. This bank has been fined nearly $50 Million dollars in the past few years for non-compliance with record keeping obligations in other areas of their business. They’ve denied the allegations by the regulator of any wrongdoing, but entered into agreements to accept oversight by an independent monitor. We’ll attempt to support them through this process (at the cost of a mere rounding error versus the $50m penalty they have already paid), but I don’t know whether they will accept our offer of assistance. I would hate to think that this bank is just too big to care. I prefer to think that maybe they are too big for this issue to be reviewed by the right person in compliance or legal. I guess this is what it means when they say, “You can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.”
My next post will address any responsibility that the other service provider has in the matter.
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