Ease of Doing Business: Teamlease Regtech empowering corporates to be on the right side of the law
A passionate technocrat, Rishi Agrawal, co-founder and CEO of Teamlease Regtech, who believes that technology has the potential to transform people’s lives. He believes that innovative technology-based solutions can reimagine the country’s complex regulatory environment and employer compliance management. His company has created a regulatory technology platform to automate and simplify India’s complicated and intimidating compliance environment. At its core, he intends to strengthen the country by eliminating the massive ramifications of poor compliance on businesses, employers, and investors.
In an exclusive conversation with CXOToday, Mr. Agrawal told the publication about his vision, company’s mission and how Regtech is simplifying compliance management.
Could you please explain the company’s mission and vision, as well as how they have changed over time?
The Vision of TeamLease RegTech is to help India comply. The company envisions a technology driven re-imagination of India’s employer compliances. As the economy continues its march towards the $5 trillion mark, the 21st century Indian entrepreneur does not need microscopic prescriptions. If we as a country want to be more competitive globally, our business environment has to be more enabling. It is here that TL RegTech stands tall with its Mission of keeping Corporate India on the right side of the law. The complexity of the compliance ecosystem lies not only in the number of compliance requirements but also in the ongoing nature of compliances. The business compliance framework is riddled with ‘regulatory cholesterol’ that has hindered the flow of innovation and entrepreneurship. To illustrate, an enterprise with just a single manufacturing unit faces about 50 display requirements which it must comply with on a continual basis. In addition, more than 40 registers have to be maintained which should be up-to-date at any given point in time. On average, an MSME or start-up is required to obtain at least 30 different licenses, registrations and approvals from various authorities. Current manual compliance processes fail to scale to meet an organization’s compliance requirements. We help corporations digitally transform their compliance management through our SaaS based multi-tenant platform that ensures timeliness, accountability, and scalability of your compliance requirements.
What distinguishes Teamlease Regtech from other significant Regtech corporate entities and platforms?
TeamLease RegTech has a digitized compliance database that covers 1,536 acts, and 69,233 compliances across 28 states and 8 Union Territories. These compliances can be searched and sorted on the basis of Acts, Rules, Risk levels, Penalty type, Industry, Compliance Category amongst others. The compliances are compiled by tracking over 2200 government websites that publish regulatory updates, and changes in compliance deadlines, duty structures, penalties, forms, and formats of filings, returns, challans, etc. All new Acts, Regulations, and Rules are tracked and collated by our database. The utilization of technology driven solutions allow us to identify and publish the changes in any compliance and regulatory requirements as goods of national importance and use. Our digital compliance platform can track regulatory changes on a real-time basis and deliver the relevant updates typically within 24 hours of notification. Through automated compliance management, employers can avoid missing critical updates and tackle them in a timely manner. It creates a central repository of all compliance paperwork containing digital, verified and tamper-proof copies of each document. It also serves as a nodal point for all working files. The digital document repository serves as a one-stop destination for arranging and accessing paperwork. This integrated document management saves valuable time, energy and resources for employers, allowing them to shift their focus to priority tasks.
The company has clients across 46 sectors that use our regulatory technology solutions. We offer a mature SaaS product that encapsulates the nuances of the complex regulatory ecosystem of India. We have been able to automate the generation of compliance documents across key compliance categories of Labour, Commercial, Industry-Specific, Environment, Health & Safety (EHS), Finance & Taxation, and Secretarial.
What role did regulatory technology play in India’s development?
Regulatory technology has been playing a significant role in fuelling the economic development in India. It has allowed corporate entities to shift from Ad Hoc, Manual, Paper-based, and People dependent compliance to a Paperless, Presenceless, and Cashless compliance process. Such a transformation reduces the cost of compliance and reduces the instances of poor compliance, reducing exposure to fines and penalties.
Regtechs are powerful tools that will rid the Indian entrepreneur from the menace of Inspector Raj. As businesses switch to technology based compliance, they will get access to verifiable and tamper proof compliance records, audit trails, and paperless filings. This increase in transparency will also help in the timely completion of compliance procedures and filings. The enormous gap in the efficiency of legacy
compliance processes and digital compliance solutions is self-evident. As such, compliance management becomes easy, timely, and transparent, exponentially.
How does TeamLease RegTech help businesses identify the precise level of criminalization in the corporate compliance environment in India?
TeamLease RegTech boasts of the best digitized compliance database in the country. Every compliance is rated on a scale of severity with the risk levels going from Critical to High to Medium to Low. This severity is in turn decided by the nature of the penalty in case of non-compliance. Its database has 26,134 compliances among the 69,233 provisions that provide for jail term for business entities. TeamLease Regtech has delved deeper into these thousands of provisions that carry a jail term in its Jailed for Doing Business Report.
Every time a new customer comes on-board, TLRegTech identifies all the applicable compliances along with their associated risk levels from its dynamic database. Every compliance requirement that carries a jail term in the event of their contravention is rated as critical.
What industries are being driven by regulatory technology?
Regulatory technology is seeing an accelerated growth with more and more industries adopting regulatory technology solutions. A large-scale adoption of digital compliance services is being seen in the manufacturing industries and service sectors. Among the manufacturing industries, MSMEs and large corporations in the Automotive sector, Chemicals sector, Pharmaceuticals sector, Engineering sector, Food Processing sector are at the forefront of embracing RegTech solutions. On the other hand, service sectors such as NBFCs, Retail Chains, Healthcare etc. have also started relying on these solutions to meet their compliance needs and stay on the right side of the law.
What are the most recent developments in the Indian Regtech sector?
The Indian Regtech sector has welcomed a host of recent developments that are geared towards improving the Ease of Doing Business for corporates. The decriminalization of employer compliance is a work in progress and a bill related to the same is expected to be tabled during the winter session of the parliament. Several provisions of the CGST Act are already being considered for decriminalization as the government is getting ready to introduce nationwide compliance reforms. Government ministries,departments, and regulatory bodies alike have been pushing for the digitization of filings of various returns and grants of various licenses.
Recently, FICCI launched its RegTech initiative to push for Cashless, Presenceless, and Paperless SEBI compliances. The initiative was launched by Ms. Madhabi Puri Buch, Chairman, SEBI in September of this year. In addition, the rationalization of compliance and regulatory requirements has been on the Government agenda as India is rushing towards the $5 trillion GDP milestone.
