Geneva Compliance Group
One Step Ahead of the Regulatory and Compliance Requirements

At a time when laws and regulations are continuously evolving, in-house compliance departments in organizations find it daunting to keep up with the rapid developments. Managing complex compliance requirements as well as the technology tools and data requires expertise and experience, which is often missing within companies. Stepping up the challenge, Geneva Compliance Group (GCG) is helping organizations with its unconventional compliance services that are built with a focus on a pragmatic approach. “We are a one-stop-shop that manages regulatory, compliance, and related technology aspects for our clients, thus aiding them to focus on their core business processes,” says Guillaume de Boccard, Managing Partner of GCG.

Founded in 2013, GCG came into existence in anticipation of the FATCA regulation. Ever since, the company has been catering to the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) and the FATCA requirements of its clients from the financial services industry. “By constantly monitoring the latest rules and regulations that are highly likely to be implemented, we keep our clients apprised of the developments from a compliance perspective,” says de Boccard.

This helps our clients to stay informed and respond quickly to the new rules. On the one hand, GCG offers consulting services to guide clients in their compliance journey, and on the other hand, it provides the operational support by helping them implement and respond to the new policies in their infrastructure.

For its small and medium-sized business clients, GCG also provides traditional compliance services wherein it monitors transactions, politically-exposed people, and anti-money laundering activities, among others. The company deploys a two-member team comprising a lawyer and a trained compliance officer. Regardless of the complexity of the systems employed at the client premises, the team can work with diverse systems and data types to extract the right data for the right requirement.

Often, large enterprises are in need of specialized solutions to implement the new compliance changes holistically across their infrastructure spread across regions. To that end, GCG participates in projects to meet the evolving regulatory and reporting needs. “We bring our subject matter expertise combined to our knowledge of legal and technology to build simple solutions to gather data and report it efficiently to the concerned authorities,” says Michel Chauvet, Managing Partner of GCG.

In addition, GCG offers in-house reporting-centric applications to gather and process compliance and regulation data on behalf of its clients. With such nimble service capabilities, GCG has served more than 350 B2B clients and delivered over 4,500 reports in 29 jurisdictions in less than three years.

For the future, GCG can be expected to launch an online platform capable of managing CRS and FATCA reporting for clients to help them exchange data with their customers in a centralized, organized, and secure manner. Besides, the firm is also considering the possibility of extending its services beyond Switzerland soon. “We anticipate high demand in externalization where we are already witnessing increasing demand from smaller clients who do not have sufficient and qualified resources,” says Chauvet. Additionally, as part of its business model, GCG plans to offer consulting services to support companies in adopting the new regulations of the Financial Services Authority Act which will come into force in Switzerland in January 2020. As per the act, financial institutions shall have an independent compliance function. With rich experience in the compliance environment, GCG aims to capitalize on the opportunities in the outsourced compliance service market.