Vishal is responsible for driving growth in South & South East Asia by leveraging global propositions and expanding local presence. Prior to this role, he was the Chief Financial Officer for Thomson Reuters South Asia, ASEAN & North Asia. He has worked across roles ranging from treasury, M&A, decision support, strategy & operations across markets including New York, Sao Paulo and Mumbai.

Breaking the Propensity

• Rethinking partnership models – from outsourcing to right sourcing
• Emerging as a Product innovation destination
• Redefining the business relevance

Covid-19 is here to stay. It has and will continue to change the way organisations work and serve customers. But at the same time, it has opened opportunities for Global Capability Centers like never before to explore areas that were not considered feasible for centralization.

And leaders who want to break away from competition need to take advantage of this opportunity to initiate or speed up their organization’s transformation journey. For instance, today’s CFOs and CIOs understand that the days of an all-pervasive ERP system are passe – this is an era of specialist systems that solve complex problems, hitherto considered 'unautomatable’, which are connected to the core ERP through APIs (Application Programming Interface).

Today’s organizations are operating in an increasingly global marketplace that is constantly getting disrupted. Senior executives are increasingly required to focus on strategy so that the company is not rendered irrelevant by new disruptive technology. However, a new challenge is emerging for corporations as they enter the VUCA-R world – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity caused by rapid Regulatory changes. These VUCA-R forces are causing a hindrance in the fast growth of corporations.

Chief among these are:

 •  A multi-fold increase in regulation at a historic pace

•  Governments taking the lead in investing and embracing technology areas like taxation and compliance at a much faster rate than the private sector

•  Management and the Board of Directors mandating a ‘zero non-compliance’ policy. 

Paradoxically, this has senior company officials spending more time in managing the increasing complexities in the traditional areas of risk, compliance and taxation. And while there is willingness to leverage technology and automation to address these complexities, the barriers to adoption are the need to stay local due to the requirement for local expertise – and hence these areas are considered ‘unautomatable’.

Enter the world of Specialised Compliance Technology or what some call Expert-Diven Systems. These systems are designed to meet taxation and trade regulations offering several advantages. Since these are designed to deal with specific areas like tax, risk, trade and legal, the domain knowledge for these functions is built into them. They come with built-in repositories of information on compliance rules and regulations and data such as tax rates and negative lists for trade, which are updated in real-time. Organisations can review reports and dashboards of their tax and compliance obligations across 100+ countries, offering unprecedented agility for an enterprise to meet emerging challenges. These are akin to having a consultant on the cloud, except that these systems are available 24x7 and don’t charge by the hour.

However, shortlisting these specialized expert-driven technologies requires navigating new requirements and priorities. We, at Thomson Reuters, have developed a framework to help organizations evaluate expert-driven technologies - which we call the SECURE framework.

Leveraging the SECURE framework, we expect organizations to be able to identify technology solutions to navigate the regulatory tsunami that prove to be both effective and efficient. This will help senior executives breathe a sigh of relief to not have to spend a disproportionate amount of time in the traditional areas of risk, compliance and taxation – but on strategies to protect against the threat of new disruptions in their core business.

Author: Vishal Parekh, Head - South & South East Asia, Thomson Reuters