Every bank or credit union has thousands of regulations they are required to follow. Being out of compliance comes with the threat of thousands or millions in penalties, or even worse – being taken over by federal regulators or shut down completely.

While databases of these regulations exist, understanding which ones your financial institution must follow and how you put compliance into action is daunting. Regulators require all financial institutions to have a Compliance Management System in place, and we set out to fill a hole in the marketplace by providing a CMS that not only fulfills a regulatory obligation but offers in-depth guidance within the context of an institution’s overall risk management plan.

Research & Discovery

We kicked off the project with a round of stakeholder interviews – from the CEO of our company to former regulators who sit on the company board. They shared great insights about the problems that could be solved with a new product, but our scope was still too broad.

Running a 1-week Design Sprint helped to narrow our scope of focus for MVP, and prospective customer interviews helped disprove initial guesses at product-market fit.

Narrowing in on two specific personas, we held several User Story Mapping sessions to craft the backbone of what would become our initial product offering.

Using Axure, we turned paper sketches into interactive prototypes and further validated each section of the app with our prospective customer cohort.

Solution

Ncomply covers the entirety of compliance, from complaint management to changes in policies, procedures, or products and services offered, to training, task management and more. Here’s some of the highlights!

Research Library
Beyond giving customers easy-to-understand categories for exploring regulations, the biggest differentiator between public indexes and Ncomply is the data-mapping system. The first filter on the page is the most powerful – allowing customers to see just what is applicable to their specific organization.

For every state and federal regulation, the legal team at Ncontracts mapped the criteria that correlates: the amount of assets managed, the products and services offered, the states in which they do business. Answering a few simple onboarding questions on first use gives the system all the data needed to make this filter work.

For each regulation, there’s a human-written summary of what the regulation is actually saying, a point-by-point list of the requirements an institution has to abide by, and templated tasks that can be adopted for becoming compliant.

Policy Management

With most policies due for review every 12-18 months, customers described again and again the need for a digital source of truth, keeping track of when it was last-approved and by whom, and when the board of directors needs to approve it again.

Task Management
Understanding what you need to do to be compliant is important, but it isn’t useful without the ability to take action. We created a task management system that lets managers check progress and have conversation threads on a per-task basis, as well as enables collaboration with individuals that might not be users of the system – like 3rd party auditors or legal consultanting firms.

The platform was built so that tasks could be organized into groups based on regulation updates or strategic initiatives. Looking-forward, we designed the tasks to be product-agnostic so that the engine could be utilized for handling tasks for all products in the Ncontracts suite.

Results

The team was able to go from idea to the marketplace in 6 months, launching at the 2019 ABA conference.

Over the following 18 months, we continued to mature both the in-house generated content, training materials, and depth of features. These efforts grew the new line of business to several million dollars in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Ncomply continues to be one of the top-selling CMS products in the marketplace.