New partnership

Why has smart/tasking and Citycom Solutions formed a ‘working partnership’?
Moving forward, smart/tasking and Citycom will collaborate on some projects where there is a clear benefit to having both organisations’ capabilities combined. Smart/tasking’s passion for optimisation, and Citycom’s strength in the data and automation arena, makes for a powerful proposition that will drive even greater benefits to our clients.

What sort of projects will the two organisations work on together?
One of their biggest areas of focus is risk assurance and Compliance. All too often, businesses view compliance as something that requires more resource – more people, more investment, and more time. Smart/tasking and Citycom believe that more intelligent, more streamlined processes are a much more effective answer, and will deliver longer-term benefits than putting more resource onto an issue alone.

What does ‘working partnership’ mean for Citycom and smart/tasking?
For the two organisations, ‘working partnership’ means high levels of collaboration. When required, we’ll be working seamlessly as one unit, so clients who engage us will get one key point of contact, one approach and methodology, and one set of engagement principles for the duration of the project – to ensure maximum impact for the client, with the outstanding results they are seeking. Outside of joint project commitments, Citycom and smart/tasking will continue operating as two independent companies, with their respective websites, marketing and engagement activities, and networks.

What do the two organisations aim to achieve?
Smart/tasking and Citycom Solutions aim to support organisations by combining their data, analytics, and business optimisation skills, with a strong focus on people, process, and technology. In particular, we aim to support organisations that need a dedicated, specialist approach to their risk assurance and compliance protocols. This plays directly into our combined capabilities, and will also enhance our reputations and intensify market penetration. Naturally, we would not be venturing into this working partnership if we did not believe it would also support our own business strategies. We are excited about our new ways of working together, and we firmly believe it marks a milestone in our journey as two businesses who have found a natural partner in one another.

What will be the primary areas of focus?
As mentioned, the initial and immediate area of focus will be on organisations that need a dedicated, specialist approach to their risk assurance and compliance protocols. This leans naturally towards the financial services sector: banking, investments, insurance, wealth management, funds, and so forth. However, all organisations require some level of compliance and risk assurance: to their customers, their suppliers, their shareholders, and to their supervisors and regulators. We will build out from our initial area of focus, as the parallels between different sectors become clear, and our offering more compelling to other organisations.

What are the market drivers for the new working partnership?
Certainly in financial services (but also in other sectors), in addition to the intensifying need to control costs, regulation is intensifying and the requirement to monitor and report on risk is becoming more stringent. This is due to a number of factors, ranging from widespread home- and remote-working (leading to increased risk of security breaches and cyber-crime); to greater reliance upon the Cloud; through to consumer accessibility via mobile devices. As the working world becomes more flexible and more accessible, risks become exposed and easier to leverage. Organisations recognise this, but typically address the problem by investing large sums of money and large teams of people. This rarely gets to the heart of the problem; rather, it provides an expensive bandage with the real problem undiagnosed (or inaccessible due to lack of insight and capability).

Why is the regulatory world changing so fast?
Organisations today are navigating change at a faster pace than ever, and standard regulatory oversight is struggling to keep pace. In a 2020 survey of commercial organisations across nearly 200 countries, an average of 257 regulatory alerts were reported every single day. The recent pandemic prompted businesses to move more of their activities online, creating more data security challenges and more opportunities for cyber criminals to target vulnerable organisations. This evolution has naturally caused regulators to tighten up existing guidelines in addition to introducing new ones. As a result, organisations which may struggle to adapt to regulatory change quickly are constantly playing catch-up. Day-to-day operations prevent a “back to basics” review of systems and processes, and a patchwork approach to compliance and risk assurance is often the result.

How does smart/tasking and Citycom’s approach differ from other firms?
Smart/tasking and Citycom aim directly at the heart of the issue: assessing the organisational structures necessary to support effective compliance assurance; neatening up data collection, storage and interrogation methods; automating processes that fail when reliant upon basic electronic or manual handling, and providing automated, real-time reporting that is largely impervious to cyber-attack. By optimising processes with intelligent, secure technologies, we are helping organisations to future-proof their data storage and enhance their compliance standards, which in turn opens up new communications front with regulators and supervisors in their jurisdictions.

Will this new working partnership focus more on the US, the UK, or both?
We envisage this joint working partnership will be popular across all our operations, as the market drivers are largely the same in all geographies (albeit with slightly different requirements depending on jurisdiction).