How SMCR creates an administrative burden
The FCA's Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SMCR) demands greater personal accountability, especially from Senior Managers, and a minimum standard of conduct from all employees. It is a total compliance regime that has led to numerous workflows.
These include allocating responsibilities to Senior Managers, conducting Fit and Proper checks, certifying all Certified Persons, taking Reasonable Steps, creating Handover Notes, and keeping scores of records of all these actions as well as training, policy attestations, breaches and committee composition.
The administration of all these workflows is complex and weighs heavily on staff time. It requires dozens of submissions, checks and registers that can drain management time. Digitising SMCR compliance is not only convenient but vital.
Challenges of SMCR compliance
Most financial firms use a mix of documents and spreadsheets alongside a legacy record system to manage their SMCR workflows.
This approach leads to many challenges:
- Senior managers and certified persons need to be chased to complete their submissions.
- Senior managers find it difficult to delegate time-consuming tasks to junior staff.
- Records lie in several different places - online and offline - with no way of getting a complete picture of any individual.
- Lack of transparency throughout the whole process.
- Risk of data inconsistencies, missed deadlines and potential errors in tracking and reporting.
SMCR 360 provides an integrated digital solution
SCMR 360 is a comprehensive, integrated, digital SMCR compliance solution.
It enables clients to digitise, streamline and integrate their SMCR workflows on one portal to improve data accuracy and time efficiencies whilst minimising risk.
The suite of online tools it provides helps to streamline the approval of senior managers and annual certification of material risk takers. Automating chase-ups and record keeping to aid FCA submissions and internal audits.
Dashboards combine the records from various submissions, training, policy attestation, and registers to give a complete view of each employee's compliance status.
Finally, it provides alerts, flagging potential non-compliance issues.
Feedback from Allenby Capital
SMCR 360 has helped us to automate processes, reduce paperwork in the form of spreadsheets, and mitigate the risk of technical breaches of SMCR by ensuring records are accurate and up-to-date. It has ensured confidence within compliance teams that Allenby was meeting their responsibilities and created efficiencies.
Want to learn more about SMCR Compliance?
To help you plan and execute compliance in your organisation, we have created a comprehensive SMCR roadmap.
Our best-selling SMCR Library and award-winning LMS provide a one-stop compliance training solution, including Introduction to SMCR e-learning.
And our searchable compliance glossaries explain key terms and regularly report on learnings from the largest compliance fines resulting from regulatory breaches.
We also have 100+ free compliance training aids, including assessments, best practice guides, checklists, desk aids, eBooks, games, posters, training presentations and even e-learning modules!
If you'd like to stay up to date with SMCR best practices, industry insights and key trends across regulatory compliance, digital learning, EdTech and RegTech news, subscribe to the Skillcast FCA Compliance Bulletin.
Last but not least, you can interact in person with thought leaders and your peers at one of our popular live webinars and face-to-face events.
If you've any questions or concerns about compliance or e-learning, please get in touch.
We're happy to help!
