Perry Robinson
President & CEOAbout the author
The Background
In my last two blog posts, I have shared a case study about a customer RocketDocs lost who made a decision to move to another service provider who won’t assist them with compliance with their regulatory obligations and a subsequent decision by the bank to perhaps willingly delete records they are required to maintain for a period of 5 years. I shared my belief that the service provider they moved to was perhaps willingly uninformed of these regulations and perhaps obfuscating how their product actually works.
This post will complete the case study by sharing what we believe that they should have done differently.
The Legal
Record keeping obligations arise in many regulated industries, but particularly in financial services, healthcare, life sciences, and insurance. In these businesses, regulations requiring companies to maintain records of marketing representations and sales materials were created as a result bad behaviors by some companies in those industries in the past.
You see these regulations at work in footnotes and quickly read disclosures that “past performance is not a guarantee” or “side effects may include” or “you have the right to cancel your policy…”. These regulations also govern activities in which investors or potential customers conduct due diligence about companies they may work with via questionnaires like Information Security Questionnaires, RFPs, Vendor Qualification Questionnaires and DDQs.
How RocketDocs Supports Regulated Industries
RocketDocs’ technology supports these highly regulated businesses by assisting them with maintaining SME approved content to use to complete these questionnaires and by providing technology that automates the process of creating an initial draft. RocketDocs reduces the time it takes to answer these long, repetitive questionnaires from weeks to a matter of hours, and we do so while building their compliance record. RocketDocs technology tracks each step of the process. We built it to do this specifically for regulated companies.
So when our bank customer underwent restructuring, they chose to use a different service provider with similar technology. But the service provider they chose really only helps to automate the process. Their solution works fine for automation. It is not a bad one and is fine for unregulated businesses. BUT they don’t function as a system of record and don’t support their regulatory compliance. So it is not the right option for regulated companies.
What They Could Have Done
Obviously, the first option is they could’ve stayed with us. Staying with RocketDocs as their solution likely could save them nearly $50 Million dollars in additional fines, with our solution costing no where near that amount.
Everything has an opportunity cost and cutting down costs so dramatically leads to employees with less resources, and less resources means they have to get creative with the solutions they come up with. But creative solutions can have unregulated, severe consequences. To the tune of nearly $50 Million dollars.
The second option is accepting our offer for their data that was stored compliantly within RocketDocs. We had given them the option to have their data given to them in a way that complied with regulations. Any kind of response would have likely saved them from the compliance violations they have suffered through.
Conclusion
If you don’t want to be subject to regulatory fines, you really need to do your homework. It is critical that you assess the vendor’s ability to meet your business needs and support your regulatoy obligations. It can save you millions.
Learn more about RocketDocs | Take our short RFP Efficiency Quiz to see how your RFP process stacks up. | Schedule a Demo to see RocketDocs in action.
