The Skywalker of Compliance Technology with Parth Chanda

Comtech

This week on ComTech, Tom Fox and Valerie Charles welcome their first guest. Parth Chanda is the founder and CEO of Lextegrity and an innovator and thought leader in the compliance space. Valerie describes him as a “pioneering Skywalker”. She comments that he is different from many compliance technology entrepreneurs as he himself was a practicing compliance professional for many years. “I think he understands operationalizing these things and using the technology in a way that is spot on for the function,” Valerie says. Tom, Valerie, and Parth discuss Lextegrity’s innovative end-to-end solution and how it’s helping their clients upgrade their compliance programs.

Compliance Solution for the 1%

“I’ve really been a compliance lawyer from day one,” Parth tells the hosts. He tells Tom that his in-house experience at Shearman & Sterling, Avon and Pfizer, coupled with the changes in the compliance space over the years influenced his vision for Lextegrity. Importantly, he realized a gap in the market for a compliance solution based on data analytics.

“A lot of these processes that every company has hung their hat on for many years [are] necessary, but they’re not necessarily sufficient to manage risk in this space,” Parth remarks. “The process works for the 99% of your employees who are already trying to do the right thing… But anti-corruption work is about finding those edge cases - that 1% or 0.1% or whatever that number is in your organization - of employees who are not doing the right thing… I began to see that data was really the future. Data analytics was really needed to complement these necessary processes... to really have end-to-end risk management across what the DOJ now describes as the lifespan of your risk.”

A More Effective and Efficient Approach

Valerie asks Parth what led him to found Lextegrity. He responds that he wanted to take a more proactive approach to risk management. The biggest lesson he learned from his years as an in-house compliance professional was that preventing wrongdoing is better and cheaper than correcting it. However, the compliance officer’s role is not to prevent wrongdoing 100% of the time but to make it harder to do wrong and detect it as quickly as possible. Scalable technology, he found, is the only way to achieve this goal efficiently and effectively.

Parth describes how Lextegrity’s solution makes compliance approachable for their clients. Some of the features of their technology solution are:

• End-to-end: “We are really the only platform today that brings technology across the entire spend life cycle.”
• Agnostic workflow tool that can handle any type of workflow, and other features including aggregate spend triggering and frequency triggering.
• Integrations with major downstream systems.
• Modular and customizable to each client’s needs.

He describes how machine learning is continuously improving the solution, as well as how their partnerships with other companies in the Integrity Analytics Collective is contributing to the industry as a whole.

Where to Start and the Future of Lextegrity

Valerie asks where a company that wants to improve its compliance program should start. Parth responds that they should start with the data and move backward. “That is the lowest hanging, high-value fruit available for compliance officers,” he says. From there, “think about how your existing systems could be upgraded to help support those analytics and that data approach.” Valerie comments - and Parth agrees - that both frontend training and data analytics should be part of a complete compliance program. She asks about the future of Lextegrity. Parth shares three key areas of focus for his company. The third key, he says, is simply to get the word out about what they have to offer.

Resources

Lextegrity.com

Ethisphere.com/Lextegrity

Parth Chanda on LinkedIn

[e-mail]