Services Help Storage Managers With Compliance

When the Canadian financial giant TSX Group, which operates the Toronto Stock Exchange along with a range of other trading networks, decided to revise its regulatory compliance policies, it didn't do the job alone. Instead, it hired an online service from a company called Complinet, which not only keeps TSX updated on the regulations it needs to track, but ensures that all internal TSX divisions are kept up-to-date with any changes.

"We believe it is vital that our senior issuers are able to have the most up-to-date and flexible access to our rules and policies," said Richard Nadeau, SVP of the Toronto Stock Exchange, in a prepared statement. "Complinet will make it much easier to locate current and past versions of these rules."

Complinet, a 10-year-old company with 230 employees based in London and New York, offers a series of software-based services that track and update financial companies on the content and ongoing status of worldwide regulations.

What's this got to do with storage management?

Plenty, if you're in the financial services business. IT pros responsible for setting policies on email management or data archiving often have trouble knowing what they need to save or watch for, experts say. And that's the problem Complinet aims to solve. It delivers information to specific departments, like IT, about how changes to regulations will actually affect the policies a company follows.Say, for instance, that a legal department keeps the financial regulations for its Wall Street business in a Documentum repository. If the firm is willing to pay the fees, Complinet will keep that repository updated on securities laws and regulations that affect the data. Updates will show in specific interfaces for the IT division, which in turn can be used to tweak or modify email and archiving procedures.

Complinet calls this its "Policy Manager" service. The setup costs from $50,000 to $300,000 annually. It provides Intranet access to Complinet-hosted applications that have been integrated with the customer's apps.

The high cost of hiring Complinet explains why only financial services firms, whose existence depends on being compliant, are adopting it. That said, plenty of smaller companies have tapped Complinet for information delivery in a subscription format. Complinet claims 1,300 worldwide customers in 81 countries, of which about 120 are using Policy Manager.

Business is doing well, execs say. Complinet is privately funded, though not by VCs, and has reportedly benefited from the ongoing upturn in compliance requirements. "We're growing at 40 to 45 percent every year," says Paul Johns, chief marketing officer of Complinet. And any financial downturn hasn't affected business. Indeed, Johns claims that since a swarm of regulations typically follows a bear market, folk aren't stopping their funding of compliance products and services -- at least not in highly regulated businesses.

Complinet isn't alone. Content providers such as CCH Wall Street, Lexis Nexis, and Thomson provide similar compliance services.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.