A simple way to comply
with new corporate
governance rules
Our comprehensive checklist created from the Financial Reporting Council’s licensed publication and combined with best practice material includes over 200 corporate governance safeguards.
What are the new corporate governance rules?
- The Financial Reporting Council’s new Corporate Governance Code was introduced on 1st January 2019.
- All companies with a premium listing of equity shares in the UK are required to explain in their annual report and accounts how they have applied the Code.
- They must also confirm that they have adhered to the Code’s provisions, or provide an explanation where they have not.
Why does this present a problem?
- First of all, ownership can be hard to assign when someone is wary of the consequences, particularly as shareholder protection is a high profile topic.
- The complexity of the new rules makes it hard to be confident in your processes and the FRC won’t be producing a digital version anytime soon.
- Dispersed compliance data is tricky to collect, if you’re relying on spreadsheets they can be overwritten and have limited scope for audit.
- Retaining evidence can also be a problem, some firms don’t trust their internal systems and documents are being kept on multiple servers.
- All this activity comes at a cost and if the regulator does come knocking you may not have long to respond and several teams might be deployed to find the right answer.
- This is all because the new regime comes with potentially catastrophic public relations for the worst offenders.
How can Solvassure help?
- Solvassure’s cloud based technology helps organisations comply with the new Corporate Governance Code, reducing the cost of assurance activities and lending traceability to accountable managers.
- It achieves this by sending out pre-defined checks to activity owners from a rules library which is licensed by the FRC, presenting exceptions to nominated stakeholders in real time.
Regulatory checklist
Manage corporate governance effectively using systematic controls and regulatory material licensed from the Financial Reporting Council.
- Board leadership and company purpose
- Division of responsibilities
- Composition, succession and evaluation
- Audit, risk and internal control
- Remuneration
Resource accountability
Speed up the process of chasing critical information and make sure the right person is doing the right thing at the right time.
- Digital acceptance of roles and responsibilities
- Drag and drop reporting hierarchy
- Management responsibilities map.
- Handover certificates for incoming replacements
- Operational monitoring with historical evidence
Compliance controls
Lower the cost of assurance infrastructure with fully automated activity checking and improve visibility with real time exceptions.
- Embedded access to published FRC regulations
- Calendar based audit activities
- Board and committee governance
- Whistleblowing function to report breaches
- Notifications suite for user communication
- Data import from external systems
- Easy integration of new compliance packs
Managed service
We can also provide a managed service to set up and administer your corporate governance assurance obligations using our technology, whilst you can’t outsource the responsibility you can outsource the process.
- Free up your team to concentrate on business as usual activities
- Ensure that all processes are set up and run with minimum effort
- Improve the quality and effectiveness of your policies and controls
- Easily scale up (and down) trained resource to meet demand
- Enrich your compliance productivity, quality and performance metrics
- Convert fixed costs into variable costs and release working capital
- Add new regulations into the same service to increase savings further
Secure hosting
Our software as a service solution provides a single source of information twenty four seven and lowers compliance expenditure with cost effective pricing.
- Secure cloud based platform
- Data centre conforms to ISO27001
- Smartphone app with location marking
- Business hours helpdesk
Key principles
An effective board defines the company’s purpose and then sets a strategy to deliver it, underpinned by the values and behaviours that shape its culture and the way it conducts its business.
The board, supported by the company secretary, should ensure that it has the policies, processes, information, time and resources it needs in order to function effectively and efficiently.
Appointments to the board should be a formal, rigorous and transparent procedure to ensure that members with a combination of skills, experience and knowledge continue to contribute effectively.
The board should establish formal and transparent policies and procedures to ensure the independence and effectiveness of risk management and audit functions.
Executive remuneration should be aligned to company purpose and values, and be clearly linked to the successful delivery of the company’s long-term strategy.
SMCR Compliance Monitoring
Find out more
Where is our material licensed from?
The Financial Reporting Council’s mission is to promote transparency and integrity in business. The FRC sets the UK Corporate Governance and Stewardship Codes and UK standards for accounting and actuarial work; monitors and takes action to promote the quality of corporate reporting; and operates independent enforcement arrangements for accountants and actuaries. As the Competent Authority for audit in the UK the FRC sets auditing and ethical standards and monitors and enforces audit quality.
Solvassure.
Assurance Technology.
