Let’s start with a brief introduction, what can you tell us about LARI digital AG and your RegTech offering?
We are swiss based technology company. The secret to our success is our focus on building a stellar team and relentless obsession to understand the challenges our customers face in their daily work and develop solutions that will solve these challenges and increase the value output of each user of our platform.
LARI automates the regulatory compliance process as well as other corporate legal and compliance processes. We support in-house specialists to detect, evaluate and comply with new regulatory requirements up to their implementation and periodic control. Our focus lies on DACH, UK and EU regulations.
What are some of the biggest challenges your solution solves for your clients?
Legislation requires financial institutions to implement appropriate legal monitoring. Check European requirements such as Article 46 of the Solvency II Directive and Article 270 of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2015/35. This has been transposed into national law of all European countries as for instance with Germany under §29 VAG as well as in BaFin circular 2/2017. The compliance function faced up to this challenge long before the requirements were issued. With around 500 laws per legislative period plus EU regulations, interpretative notes, recommendations for action, supervisory commentaries, etc. from nearly 53 territories, loss-free monitoring and processing is hardly possible without technical support.
- The legislation further requires financial institutions to document all the decisions and measurements regarding regulatory changes
- Compliance specialists have to make sure that the processes/documents/obligations are changed. LARI helps them to track what has been changed and controlled already
- Compliance specialists need to report upcoming changes, risks and potential impacts of changes to their executive board. These reports can be generated with LARI
- Compliance teams usually work with their email and excel sheets to have data shared and see what everyone is working on. Data is lost and in case someone leaves the company, it is hard to see what that person was working on
Could you give us a use case of why a client came to you and how they are using your solution to solve their particular challenge?
We had the opportunity to work early on with the Swiss team of global Insurance company. The people there were and still are innovative thinger that were willig to give us, an agile company, a shoot at solving some pretty rigid challenges. This is what we did:
Initial situation
Many new regulatory requirements (including the documentation of the entire regulatory change management, see FINMA Circular 2017/02) have presented the company with challenges that could not have been met without additional resources. Among other things, the entire process must be re-documented.
Project goal
The monitoring of legal changes is to be automated and the documentation and cooperation of the decentralized compliance experts is to be simplified. It should be comprehensible what has been decided and discussed in the company with regard to legal advances or what the current status of each advance is. With little effort, this should enable reporting as a simple overview of upcoming regulations.
Measures
In a first step, an as-is analysis of the current regulatory change process was performed. Subsequently, a new, more efficient process was defined on the basis of the LARI technology. This process was then mapped in the tool and the experts involved in the process were trained to use the tool. Additional consulting mandates were saved and the entire process was mapped internally, including the compliance satellites in the individual departments.
How would you describe the differences between your offering from others in your RegTech category?
We are covering the whole regulatory change process. Other companies offer mainly tools that are either focusing only on monitoring or allow for processes to be documented but rarely connect the dots. Furthermore, the usability in term of simplicity and efficiency of our solution is state-of-the-art, many other solutions we have seen were stuck with outdated UX and UI which leads to lower efficiency.
What advice would you give to decision-makers when choosing a RegTech solution such as the ones your offer?
Have a clear understanding of the problem you want to solve and what the impact on the business will be if you are successful. This way you introduce only new solutions that will have a positive impact on your business and not solutions that look good but have limited value.
Due to the global pandemic a lot has changed in the world in the last year. How has your company changed in the in the last 12 months?
We were very fortunate to have a filled pipeline before the pandemic and although it was difficult to start new conversations we managed to keep the one we started alive, sign new clients as well as do upsell which fueled our growth. In addition to onboarding 30 new clients, we entered 2 new markets and were able to hire 10 new teammates in tech, customer success and sales.
Can you tell us about some of your most recent achievements or milestones you’ve reached?
We were able to attract incredibly talented people to work with us on our vision. I am incredibly impressed by the effort and quality of the work our team is putting into delivering the best possible software, service and overall experience for our clients.
We are all incredibly grateful for the relationships we were able to build with our clients. We meet all of them regularly to discuss existing projects, new challenges and identify new opportunities.
As a young company we manage to gain significant market share in Switzerland and move across the Swiss borders. We got our first clients in the DACH region in 2020.
What drives you as a company and what is LARI digital long term vision?
We want to stay an awesome place to work. It is one of our main focus to grow as a team and give each ouf our teammembers the opportunity to become the best possible specialist in their respective field. As a business we will become the single solution for legal and compliance departments around the globe.
What are some of the important developments you are seeing in the RegTech industry?
RegTech is mostly associated with the financial industry or sometimes even seen as a sub-category of FinTech which is wrong to me. In our case, Financial institutions make up one-third of our client base. Most of our clients come from other sectors such as energy, retail or pharmaceuticals. We see this also with other solutions out there. Regtech has evolved to a standalone category independent of FinTech.
What’s next for LARI digital?
We are constantly looking into other verticals and market. We want to grow at the fastest pace possible without compromising on quality. Quality of work for our team and quality of service for our clients.
Concretely we may expand to the UK, other european countries or even Asia within the next year.
When landing a new deal what is the biggest challenge you face to make sure your new client gets the most value out of your solution?
We have a stellar customer success team. Our customer service team is an extremely proactive team that runs a well organized and efficient onboarding and continuous active support of new and existing clients.
Our customer success managers (CSM) prepare the onboarding process as soon as a prospective client signalizes a clear intention to work with us. That way by the time our CSM talks to client for the first time they know about the challenges that need to be addressed and the key factors for success.
Getting into the onboarding process we relentlessly focus on a fast go to production and operational use of our service. That way the value output of the user can be measured fast. The fastest we can delivery value the fastest we gain more trust from our customers and can get rid of legacy processes and systems.
What’s the best way for potential clients or investors to get in touch with you?
Clients: pt@larid.digital for client relations
Investors: es@lari.digital for investor relations