Last week GRC hosted a successful Risk and Compliance customer event in Toronto with over 150 senior decision makers packed into the Board of Trade facility downtown.  Sliding into my Porter Air seat bound home for Newark I struck up a conversation with one of the attendees from TD Securities.  He too was heading south, jumping into meetings to discuss Global regulatory frameworks with his American colleagues.  Canada did not go through the same financial collapse as it’s southerly neighbor, not necessarily because of any insight but partly due to a more conservative nature on a national, cultural scale. Canada is by its own admission more risk adverse than the United States, a fact that has recently led to more collaboration and quickly as we ascended in our cosy twin propped aircraft became the focus of our conversation… we ordered a glass of Niagaran wine and settled into our short flight across the border.

07 May 2012Paul Johns

My travel companion talked a little about how our customer events really were helping to firm up consistent opinion, less around what went wrong (you can tune into CNN or the BBC and of course Reuters News for that), but more about what needed to happen next. How does the industry and the markets they serve avoid, or at least manage the next regulatory failure, how does an industry largely held to blame, emerge stronger, more unified and more adept at managing regulatory risk? Tackling these weighty topics are not isolated activities, they require an open dialogue, shared perspectives and very, very candid discussions.  The financial services industry saw a lot of employee migration.  Some compliance officers in large firms went to small hedge funds and their posts in turn have been filled with former regulators.  This is a tight community of people who share a desire to strengthen their industry and their profession – one that has an elevated status in their respective firms.

So our GRC forum in Toronto, like all our customer events provide a venue to share ideas and learn about best practices but ultimately they each arrive with one question… “How is everyone else doing it?”

Regulators don’t want to be too prescriptive and so it’s down to each industry of practitioners to establish co-ordinated approaches that are forged from common, working practices. In short, the swell of community best practices can, and do lead to almost team-governing standards that sit inside broad, suggested outlines. It’s this intelligent balance of guidance based regulation and a consultative, and consulted community of regulated entities who apply this in a working model that is consistent, transparent and common that I believe offers the greatest opportunity for positive industrial revolution.

Thomson Reuters offers this incredible opportunity for its customers to stimulate this activity, across all industries both mature and maturing, in markets that are established as well as helping to form markets poised for global growth.  It is not a one to one relationship that leads to establishing true market leadership, but our ability to bind communities to create these environments for better practices.  Thomson Reuters with its unique combination of news, deep domain expertize and best-in-class solutions can help to form working markets built upon common goals, greater understanding and collaboration on a global scale. These relationships, not one-to-one with our customers but one-to-many where we focus as much on how our customers can service each other as we do on how we better service our customers can drive incredible value.