Solving the Management of Entities for Public Accounting Independence

Alex Olson
2/4/21 7:30 AM

You just want to do business with this single company. Because of the enormous amount of data running through your system, you'd like the ability to understand if you can take on new business by seeing all the relationships that could potentially stand in the way of your organizational, regional, and global compliance rules. And, you don't want to get in the way of your European peer who might be pursuing the same entity.

It's a common hangup for organizations. Individuals are searching through tons of data about companies they care about (and companies they don't care about), but they cannot understand the right course of action because of ever-changing relationships and hierarchies. For example, BlackRock has 20,000 entities. Which one of its entities can you do business with according to a myriad of regulations and your firm's policies? 

That one company is an intricate example of how challenging it is to understand, identify, and confidently act on business opportunities while remaining compliant. 

What's needed is an entity management system that helps you understand your clients' ecosystem, your relationships with that client ecosystem, and how the rules in different geographies impact those relationships. 

In Data You Trust

Whether it's personal independence, firm independence, or a risk issue on other conflicts that aren't independence related, you need a source of data about your client that you can trust.

Can you efficiently manage entity and hierarchy data on thousands of entities? Are you importing data from various sources, ensuring that the data is accurate? Do changes to the entity and hierarchy data go through a detailed review and approval process? What about related persons? Many organizations attempt to outsource this problem to data aggregators. 

Yes, you can purchase data from another company. But, can you trust that data? Is it of regulatory grade? For regulatory purposes, can the data aggregator provide updated data based on a corporate action that could trigger a series of additional restriction questions or reveal that you can pursue business opportunities? In our current automation-driven world, speed and accuracy are two identifiers of businesses that can stay ahead of the game. But, the challenge is more than keeping up with the Joneses. It's keeping up with the thousands of corporate actions that take place in a calendar year. Clearly, just buying data is not the answer.

And getting regulatory grade data is just the start. You still need to apply the regulatory and firm policy rules.

Managing Infinite Amounts of Data

As we mentioned earlier, BlackRock is related to potentially thousands of other entities through controlling and influence relationships (variable A). There are many regulatory rule sets across the world (variable B).  And, you are conducting many services throughout those related entities (variable C).  Multiplying A, B, and C creates a lot of complex data to manage, and you need to act before you lose the opportunity. How should you manage this data?

Using a system that allows you to manage data and apply the correct rule sets for global jurisdictions can alleviate potential non-compliance issues and allow your teams to focus on client service instead of serving regulatory demands. Systems need to operate at the speed of business by being able to calculate the different permutations to use for matters dealing with firm independence, scope of services, risk assessment, personal independence, and more. 

In fact, because of the decades of working with the public accounting independence rule sets, the Kingland Platform is one of the few solutions in the world that can integrate and manage your data at scale for independence issues. No more waiting. No more partial solutions.

At Kingland, we take it a step further. Instead of looking at your data world from a relational structure, we decompose hierarchies into graph nodes. This allows us to optimize the computational problem of rules, entities, services, and more.

That is just a start. Over 100 data integrity rules, built-in regulatory rules, and a flexible workflow to scale from small public accounting firms to the largest public accounting networks in the world. You can grow your business with regulatory confidence.

And because you're confident in your data, staff in South America, Germany, and the U.S. can confidently use data to explore and pursue new businesses or services while remaining compliant with regional or jurisdictional rules. And, they won't compete with each other for new business. 

See what independence compliance should look like. 

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