In any fast moving business, having a clear record of decisions, changes and their impacts is key to operating efficiently and successfully. For regulated industries, a clear governance process is a requirement and critical to ensuring compliance with local regulations.
Through our team’s experience leading financial services businesses and our conversations with more than 100 pricing and technology leaders, we’ve identified the biggest challenges facing pricing teams and by extension their compliance counterparts, when it comes to process:
Inefficient Approvals: The approvals process for pricing changes is lengthy and bureaucratic, involving formal paperwork and multiple levels of review. The lack of a streamlined system for tracking and approving changes, along with slow response times from external parties, contributes to delays and excessive administrative work.
Communication Challenges: Communication and collaboration among teams are hindered by the absence of a centralised platform, resulting in fragmented information sharing through emails, documents, and manual processes. This leads to misunderstandings, lack of visibility, slow responses, and difficulty in coordinating efforts with both internal and external stakeholders.
Regulatory Hurdles: With fragmented documentation, the compliance and audit process can prove challenging and time consuming. Evidencing the correct procedures, such as testing and relevant stakeholder approvals, have been completed is a manual process rather than codified in a pricing system.
Poor Model Management: There is a significant challenge in managing versions of pricing models and maintaining accurate records of changes made. The absence of proper version tracking and collaboration tools results in confusion, difficulty in determining model versions, and potential errors in the pricing process.
Knowledge Gaps: Bridging the gap between technical pricing experts and stakeholders lacking technical knowledge proves difficult. Explaining complex pricing concepts effectively to non-technical individuals is a challenge, along with the need for better communication and presentation skills among team members.
From our conversation with pricing leaders, 64% of them talk about process-related challenges as a significant pain point for them and their team
We believe there are many opportunities to improve such governance and approvals processes. We’ve focused on 3 areas to solve with the first version of our platform:
Manage: Ensure the correct people are attached to a new pricing change, whether they’re contributing or they are reviewing and approving. With tasks completed and approvals required before any change can be set live in the platform, there is confidence that correct procedures have been followed and no errors missed.
Store: With centralised place for your supporting assets, it’s quicker to see all the relevant materials for a given change, whether it’s new rates tables or a management presentation.
Collaborate: Instead of many emails being exchanged, bringing context and commentary to the pricing change process reduces overhead when it comes to explaining changes internally or externally to regulators.
Swallow Process is just one of 4 initial products that we’re releasing on our platform, please see our other posts for more on Testing, Publishing and Data.
Powerful apart but awesome together. Transform how you price.
We’d love to hear more about your governance and approval process pain points, so if you’re keen to share, or would like to try out the Swallow platform - please do get in touch at contact@swallow.app
