Envestnet | Yodlee navigates global compliance with Vixio horizon scanning

Global leader in data aggregation and data analytics, Envestnet | Yodlee, delivers products and services that are trusted by more than 1,400 financial institutions and FinTech companies, including 17 of the top 20 U.S. banks.

Established in the US in 1999, the following years have seen the company expand to the UK, Canada, Australia, and India. With new ambition to grow into South Africa, the EMEA team is in the stages of scoping out the country’s regulatory landscape, their partnership with Vixio has come to the fore.

“We’re seeing more and more countries develop open banking regulations [and] we need someone that we can go to who provides horizon scanning or provides that easily obtainable information [...] I can just go to Vixio, and I can go to my dashboard that I've been able to curate, which pulls up these articles and information that I need. So, I can better track what is happening in South Africa.”

- _{Principal Director of Open Banking Compliance for EMEA, Kat Cloud}

How does Envestnet | Yodlee use Vixio?

One of the pros and cons about Fintech is it’s constantly changing, so even a small change in a piece of regulation could have a major impact on a company. With a role that requires ensuring that the EMEA portion of the business remains compliant with all the rules and regulations applicable to them, we asked Kat Cloud, Principal Director of Open Banking Compliance for EMEA at Yodlee, what the biggest day-to-day challenges around regulatory changes were for her and her team. Her reply? Staying on top of them all.

A Real Time Saver

“The horizon scanning tool is incredibly easy to use. You just click on it, pick the countries that are of interest to you, and it maps it out beautifully for you.”

_{- Principal Director of Open Banking Compliance for EMEA, Kat Cloud}

In the UK, Yodlee has to keep on top of all payments, services regulations, consumer duty, data protection regulations, AML regulations, and a lot more. As Cloud reminds us, one piece of regulation isn't two pages, it's 200 pages - and you might only be interested in one of those pages. Vixio’s Horizon Scanning tool, which shows real-time updates on regulatory deadlines and trends in 140+ jurisdictions across the world, also provides full supporting documents, including speeches, guidance and consultations, and each update comes with an English summary to help users get up to speed quickly. One of Cloud’s favourite parts of this Vixio feature is “They'll give you a summary of the entire piece of regulation, but then they'll also put it into little snippets and say, ‘here are the five things that you need to know or that might be or that you should look at and do a bit more research on’. They're really good at pulling out that information, so it makes it easier for a compliance person to see what sections they need to care about.”

Furthermore, deciding which markets to enter next is a lengthy decision-making process. Since Yodlee has been going through a strategic overview internally, deciding which countries to grow into in the next couple of years, the Horizon Scanning tool has been used to unearth and understand what the team needs to know about the state of regulations in their jurisdiction options. Due to the easily accessible, bite-size key points available through the tool, this has sped the process up.

A RegTech Company that Evolves with its Clients

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“One of the standout things that we've seen is that Vixio is actually addressing that the market is growing, the market is changing, and that they need to provide different products and services to their clients that continue to be useful. It’s so nice to see that they’re actually listening to their clients.”

_{- Principal Director of Open Banking Compliance for EMEA, Kat Cloud}

Aside from Vixio continuing to add, update and adapt its products and features in line with the regulatory landscape and evolving client needs,, for Cloud, the ability to tailor her Vixio experience is important. The fact that Vixio subscribers can create a custom Watchlist, so they only receive notifications to their email based on their requirements, is a welcome feature. “That is the thing that I always check every day. I scroll through to see which articles might be of interest. It's not a huge tool, but in my day-to-day life, it is a massive tool, because it makes it more feasible to read everything I need to know”, she says. Users can also customise their view and create their own dashboards so they only see what they need to every time they log in - keeping the customer in control, and ultimately, putting their needs first.

Filling Knowledge Gaps - Fast

“We can't know everything. We can't read every single article that's out there and do our day-to-day job. That’s the number one reason we use Vixio - it’s an accurate and easy to understand single source of information.”

_{- Principal Director of Open Banking Compliance for EMEA, Kat Cloud}

It’s the Compliance team at Yodlee that makes the most use of the company’s Vixio Payments Compliance subscription. Since the team is small, and responsible for all compliance for the entire global company, it is often stretched. They receive a lot of questions they couldn’t realistically always know the answers to, and having a go-to solution like Vixio has proven to help relieve the pressures on them. The Compliance team will log onto the platform and access reliable data that they can use to find the answers they need - and relay trustworthy updates back to the rest of the company.

“I can go to the Vixio Payments Compliance platform and know that the information on there is trustworthy information, it's been thoroughly researched. And I will walk away knowing more than I did before.”

_{- Principal Director of Open Banking Compliance for EMEA, Kat Cloud}

Never Missing a Deadline

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“I can go to a calendar that’s already been set up, is actively updated and monitored, and I can just click on it and it immediately takes me to a consultation, or a notice, or whatever it is. Then I can continue to decide: yes, I need to respond to this, or it's okay if I don't.”

_{- Principal Director of Open Banking Compliance for EMEA, Kat Cloud}

With a myriad of regulatory deadlines to keep on top of, Cloud uses the Regulatory Deadlines calendar on a weekly basis to ensure the company remains compliant. This is a calendar, found in the Horizon Scanning tool, which sets out the dates when published legislation comes into force, when consultation periods on proposed regulatory development end, and when the deadlines for specific requests for information by regulatory authorities are. It’s colour coded, to more clearly show you what you need to respond to (Actionable), what you need to be aware of (Informative), and what indicates a change in the future (Indicative) - a traffic light system that Cloud is a big fan of, telling us it makes keeping up to date with deadlines a much easier task, “The colour coding has made it significantly easier, especially as I'm in charge of so many different countries, and I'm looking at so many different places - it's impossible for me to stay on top of everything.”

Intuitive RegTech with a Human Touch

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“10 out of 10 from me for the Vixio team and everything that they've done, they've been incredibly helpful.”

_{- Principal Director of Open Banking Compliance for EMEA, Kat Cloud}

At first, Cloud admits she was a little daunted by the sheer amount of information available on the platform, citing it as ‘information overload’. But after a call with her Vixio account manager, who gained an understanding of her needs, and then walked her through how to use it in a way that helped her meet them - it started to make sense. This experience underpins the importance of Vixio’s people, from the account management team to the expert analysts. The technology and research  offered is vast and reliable, but the human aspect - a person to tell you how you can use it, in a way that's best for you - is still needed.

Vixio Payments Compliance was built because the payments compliance space is incredibly technical and, as Cloud agrees, “You do need to read a lot of information to make sure that, as a company who's regulated, you’re following the rules. Because if you mess up, it could be hugely detrimental to your company.”

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Want to see how it works?

Watch our recent webinar, Customer Story in Action: How Yodlee uses Horizon Scanning, to hear Yodlee’s Kat Cloud dive deeper into how she uses the tool, and get a real-life demonstration.

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