What matters when choosing a compliance technology partner

What matters when choosing a compliance technology partner

AMP, one of Australia's largest financial services organisations, uses Objective Keystone to draft, verify, approve and publish hundreds of regulated documents. AMP's experience offers a useful lens on a bigger question: when choosing a compliance technology partner, what should you be evaluating?

Most firms compare platforms on features, integrations and price. Those are easy to score. Whether the partner keeps improving the product and strengthening your controls years after go-live is harder to assess, but just as important. AMP's experience points to four things worth looking for.

1. Verification you can trust

Manual review processes depend on individuals remembering to check every change. AMP's team built their evaluation of Objective Keystone around removing that reliance entirely.

"The verification system works such that if you edit something, it will unverify. There's no risk of someone randomly just going in, making changes, and then nobody picking it up."

— Fred Brennan, Senior Product Manager, AMP

For a regulated document, such as a Product Disclosure Statement (PDS) or Target Market Determination (TMD), an unverified change that slips through isn't just a typo risk, it's the kind of gap that draws regulator attention. Built-in verification means the record of what was checked, and when, is always accurate.

2. Resource savings that free teams for growth

"We used to have to wait weeks because there were thousands of pages of these documents. We had to wait weeks and weeks of chasing designers, following up, things coming back with mistakes, people's time doing line by line checks."

— Phillippa Huxley, Regulatory Communications Manager, AMP 

With Objective Keystone, documents are typeset at the push of a button, cutting disclosure production time for AMP from three months to three weeks. That's not just a speed gain, it's a resourcing one. As Fred said, without the platform they'd likely need a much larger team just to keep up:

"If Keystone didn't exist tomorrow, I don't know how we'd be able to function properly. Probably need a team of twenty rather than three."

Fewer people tied up in manual rework means more capacity for the work that grows the business.

3. A partner that grows with the business

AMP's initial implementation in one part of Financial Services became the model for AMP Investments, AMP Bank and AMP New Zealand, with Objective evolving alongside them rather than treating go-live as the finish line.

"Post implementation, they still stuck around to hear what we wanted to say. They would always be taking a lot of feedback to inform the next direction of where the product was going to go."

— Harry Lo, Manager, Process Communications, AMP

AMP describes Objective as "more like a business partner than just another software vendor," an outcome that's hard to spot from a demo. It only shows up once you know what to ask.

4. Reduced compliance and audit risk

For a business managing hundreds of regulated documents, the biggest risk usually isn't a single error. It's not being able to prove a process was followed at all. A complete audit trail changes that. A firm can answer a regulator's questions with evidence on hand, reducing the risk of falling short of obligations to bodies like ASIC. 

These four things, verification, resourcing, ongoing partnership, and audit-ready compliance, are easy to overlook in a features comparison. AMP's experience with Objective Keystone, verification holding up in practice, a small team managing hundreds of documents, and a product still evolving with their feedback years on, shows what matters over the long run. 

Curious how that looks in practice at AMP? Watch the full video case study.