Griffin, a banking-as-a-service and embedded finance platform provider, has adopted Clausematch’s compliance technology to aid its path to become a fully licensed bank.
According to Clausematch, Griffin will use Clausematch’s technology for drafting and reviewing all the documentation required to submit its application to the Prudential Regulatory Authority and Financial Conduct Authority to become a fully licensed bank.
The full application pack for these consist of over 100 documents, including policies, terms of references, plans, procedures and assessments. Many of these documents also require input from multiple authors and approvers across different areas of the business, including finance, risk, compliance, engineering, product and commercial operations. Once drafting is complete, all documents must go through two rounds of review and challenge before final approval.
Griffin chief operating officer Rupert Whitten said, “All of the materials we submit must go through a precise governance process. The regulators require applicants to demonstrate there has been robust challenge throughout the entire drafting process, and Clausematch gives us very clear and granular evidence that this happened and when.”
According to Griffin, having individual comment trails attributed to each paragraph made it simpler for the team to work through changes as each document passed through review. With Clausematch, Griffin had a detailed record of each change made and why.
Whitten continued, “In particular, the versioning function is very useful. It provides a complete history of the document in the document itself. All the different versions are at the same link, in the same folder, and you know everyone is working on the correct material – it’s hugely helpful.”
Marianne Cassidy – an in-house writer at Griffin – was given the responsibility of ensuring there was a cohesive narrative throughout the pack.
She said, “For longer documents, coordinating edits across five or six different authors was a nightmare. Work was getting lost or not syncing correctly, we’d have to jump on calls to sort out multiple conflicting edits. People were creating new drafts, saving things in the wrong folders, or saving them in them locally and uploading later, which meant stakeholders ended up working from different versions at one point. Clausematch effectively eliminated those challenges.
“I love that you can’t make edits offline or edit a paragraph that someone else is working on – it’s physically impossible to create conflicting changes, which is so important when you need a very precise audit trail. None of us have ever lost any work on Clausematch, and that alone is a big benefit.”
Clausematch VP of customer success Emma Kempton added, “We’re delighted to be working with Griffin. Our relationship has been mutually beneficial as not only have we supported them in applying for their banking licence with our tooling, but also along the way the Clausematch product team learnt a great deal from the Griffin team, in terms of the requirements of an organisation at this stage of their journey. Griffin created their documents on our platform from scratch, and their feedback in terms of product features has been invaluable. We are looking forward to many more years of our collaboration.”
Griffin – who officially submitted their bank authorisation application on May 12 – claims it intends to continue using Clausematch as its primary tool for drafting and maintain policies and is considering running the policy attestation process through Clausematch in the future.
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