Compliance the aim with regtech play

Julia Vojkovic and Eloise Somerford have such similar and, at times, overlapping career trajectories it seems incredible they didn’t meet until both landed the same job at Macquarie Group nine years ago.

And it was literally the same job, they claim. Their story is that Macquarie was seeking one compliance person but, after the interview process, decided to engage them both.

The pair have been peas in a pod ever since, heading down the entrepreneurial path together with a new business they established called ComplianceCo, providing services for Australian Financial Services Licence (ASFL) holders in the highly regulated independent financial advice business. They were well qualified for this step in their career.

Ms Somerford had worked in the big accounting firms before ending up as a market and participation supervision analyst at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

Ms Vojkovic started off at ASIC before joining Deloitte as a senior analyst in governance and regulatory consulting.

On paper, all of this makes sense if you considered them career consultants in the stolid world of compliance, but that is only half the story these days.

Faced with the problem of scaling up a consulting business in which expertise is paid by the hour, they decided to go into the software business, adding to those in Perth’s thriving regtech community.

“We saw a market that was, I guess it was selfish in a way, that we wanted to scale,” Ms Somerford told Business News.

“Our compliance consulting services are pricey as are all compliance consulting services, and I say that given we also still have a consulting arm. But we developed [the software] in the hope that we would have a bigger reach, be able to scale and everyone could still receive our consulting services in a much more efficient way.”

From late 2019, they started developing a business that came to be called 3Lines, which takes a lot of the manual work out of the hands of financial advisers and ensures they are up to date with all the onerous requirements of servicing an investment client.

The pair spent two years creating the product, revealing they switched developer and started again during this period, not because they were unhappy with the original supplier but rather succumbed to an unexpectedly impressive pitch from Visns Studio.

It’s a decision they never regretted. “We used it internally with our consulting clients first,” Ms Somerford said.

“We used it to facilitate their compliance committee meetings, manage their monitoring and supervision and their client file audit.

“Once we started seeing the reporting and types of data we were pulling out of it and how you could manage remediation [advice] was a really big piece, they said ‘when are we going to have access’ so we pivoted and made it more aesthetically pleasing.”

Initially, the pair thought the market would comprise sole operators who are generally under-resourced, but have found bigger groups with multiple advisers have been attracted to the product.

At this stage, they have 100 subscribers representing between 300 and 400 users.

3Lines’ first external customer signed up 18 months ago and that was actually a group, not an individual. And they have even added a white label option for other consultants since commercial launch in 2021.

The 3Lines experience was perhaps a little different from that of many other tech entrepreneurs.

“The software was profitable from the start,” Ms Vojkovic said.

“A lot of startups struggle, but we had consulting.”

The pair have decided to make the software business their main focus. They merged ComplianceCo with another group, AdviceCube Consulting.

Shelly Radford, a director of AdviceCube, is now running the consulting business, which has adopted the name 3Lines Consulting.

Ms Vojkovic said they wanted to increase their reach into the AFSL market and look to extend laterally into areas such as mortgage broking.

“At this stage we are really ambitious,” she said.

“We have a lot more to do.”