- What can you tell us about your company and your products & services?
When initially coming up with the concept and then developing the software, Richard Pike CEO was looking for a solution that could help him as a board director easily:
- understand how Risks are Aggregated
- drill down to detail from a high level
- be able to clearly focus on what was important to him
The Governor Software solution delivers an integrated and harmonized risk, compliance and performance management solution. Governor Software offers an innovative approach for organizations to map and monitor the complex interrelationship of risks, objectives, regulations, and frameworks across the organization. It enables companies to map roles and responsibilities to objectives and risk, and track accountability, providing 360°contextual awareness of risk and objectives with clear reporting to decision makers.
The product basically addresses the lack of visualization and integration of risks across the organization. It achieves this by aggregating, integrating, and visualizing risk and performance information across the organization within a single platform, allowing it to be managed from one central location and ensuring accountability. Governor’s information architecture allows for flexibility in reporting and provides real-time feedback in the form of dashboards and notifications tailored for management.
The Governor Software tool has been viewed as so powerful by the UK regulator that the FCA and Governor Software have worked together over the past two years to develop a digitized version of the FCA Handbook – Governor Reg:FCA allows compliance teams to work directly with their own live, actionable view of the FCA Handbook as on the FCA website, enabling compliance teams to easily see what needs to be done to be compliant, be aware of regulatory changes/updates as they happen and Track, Actions and Report their regulatory compliance on an ongoing basis in the FCA format.
- How came you up with the idea and what drives you?
For the last 5 years I have sat as an independent non-executive director at a number of financial institutions including permanent tsb bank, JPMorgan fund administration, JPMorgan hedge fund administration and Citadel.
Sitting on these boards has given me a very real insight into the phenomenal amount of material that non-exec directors must read, digest and make decisions on. Decisions, which must also reflect the 1000 plus pages they read last month, and the month prior to that. With a background in finance and technology, it was going through this process, understanding that if I should fail to remember one small detail while making a decision that I could be found liable, that lead me to develop the Governor Software tool.
- What is it that makes your company different from others?
Governor Software is about firms achieving true oversight and governance of their activities:
“ Software provides a real-time top down view of the risk/compliance governance and status of risk monitoring in my organization. I am using the Governor software for: ongoing risk (appetite) monitoring project management process improvement new regulations committee governance”
CFO New York Bank
- Where are you based?
Head office in Dublin, with offices in London and New York
- When was the company launched?
2015
- What traction have you made? Can you tell us about your biggest achievements so far?
Governor Software is now working with Financial Services Firm in Ireland, Europe and the US, however probably the biggest achievement to date is being recognised by the FCA as a partner to digitize the FCA Handbook and revolutionise the way the UK regulated firms monitor and keep track of how they comply with regulation.
GovernorREG:FCA
https://www.governorsoftware.com/fca-handbook
- What advice could you give to other entrepreneurs and start-ups?
Focus on the customer needs and don’t give up!
- What can you tell us about your team?
Our team has a real depth of experience in financial risk and compliance technology. We have people who have worked at in financial services firms and have gone through the pain of developing risk and compliance reports and of reading these reports. We also have superb technology people who understand that a secure and stable technology platform is vital to our success. Finally we have a great set of investors who have many years of experience at the top of large financial services firms and understand directly the challenges faced by senior leadership teams at these institutions.
- What’s next for your company?
We are focused right now on delivering value to our customers and working with the various regulators to ensure that the regulations are more easily ingested by firms.
Our next stage of product development is focused on using the data that our clients have captured to understand trends and probabilities. So we will be able to help our clients to assess the likelihood of compliance/risk failures and the potential impact of those events.
- How do potential customers and investors get in touch with you?
We have a website at www.governorsoftware.comand you can see details of our contact points at our offices in New York, London and Dublin there. I am available at Richard.pike@governorsoftware.com.
“The Business Spotlight on…” is the section at PlanetCompliance that looks at the companies active in the sectors we cover, tells their stories and introduces the solutions to give them a platform to show what they’ve got and who they are. If you want to know more about how you can get featured in this section, contact us at launch@planetcompliance.comor on Twitter at @PlanetComplianc