Governance.com: Where Technology & Support Intersect

Bert Boerman, pictured, is co-founder and CEO of Governance.com

Governance.io rebrands to reflect its role as a global end-to-end service provider for all sectors. When Governance.io first entered the scene in 2014 its goal was to use technology to facilitate good corporate governance within the fund industry. Today, its flexible, simple solution is ready to help businesses and organizations from all sectors and countries manage their data. Having witnessed that good governance relies not only on technology, but on a combination of technology and expertise, the company is introducing a new layer to its solution: expert support. CEO Bert Boerman sat down with Silicon Luxembourg to introduce Governance.com and illustrate how the company has evolved from startup to scale-up to now provide end-to-end service.
by: Natalia Hurt
photo: Olivier Minaire
featured: Bert Boerman

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What changes have you made to your governance solution?

Governance.io is a technology solution known for helping companies organize data, documents and control management, mostly around regulated structures.

We started with investment funds because that’s where the biggest need for innovation is. It’s all spreadsheets. They typically have no technology in place even though there’s an enormous amount of regulation pushing on them.

Now we have a much wider scope and that flexibility component is a big change.

What we’ve found is that if you want to take people from the stone age to something organized, just offering technology is not enough. You can throw technology at a complex problem, but if you don’t have the processes and procedures in place then it’s not going to work. The same is true in reverse.

We believe that a marriage of the two is the solution. You need to have technology to manage the data and support to make sure that you’re in line with the requirements. That’s what governance.com is — a platform that combines the technology of governance.io with the support services of governance.support.

“We’re releasing the experts online in the next couple of weeks. By the end of the year, we should have between 25 and 50 experts.”

When did you first realize that something was missing?

Even though we have good traction and large clients, we weren’t going fast enough. Clients would say, “I love your technology, but I don’t even want to think about going through the steps of cleaning up my data and designing the new processes.”

We took a lot of feedback from our clients and from prospects who chose not to become clients. We realized a little over a year ago that support was a missing component, but we can’t offer that to every client. We need to focus on offering great technology. We can support the clients in the industries we know and the countries where we are active but not outside of that.

What we’re doing with Governance.support is building a network of partners that can offer the right content and support to our clients in any sector and country. Up until now we’ve had the technology, but not the support.

Who will be a part of that network?

Experts from companies that specialize in relevant industries. They could be law firms, consultancy and support companies, implementation companies… We are talking to two big four companies right now. Some of our expert partners provide data integration services, so they can actually help our clients feed the data into governance.io.

We’re releasing the experts online in the next couple of weeks. By the end of the year, we should have between 25 and 50 experts.

Their level of involvement is flexible and based on the client’s needs. They can help with setup, ongoing management, crisis management, etc. You can pick and choose what you want.

“What if you could take a system that handles the technical side and have a support partner that tells you the exact processes you need to put in place to be compliant?”

How will this support option help?

If you look at the fund business, our clients spend a lot of time monitoring regulation, but that’s not their core business. Their core business is to apply the regulation that is valid today and to make sure they have a good offering for their clients. If you’re busy reading the countless circulars and legislation that are coming out then you’re not focusing on your client anymore.

What if you could take a system that handles the technical side and have a support partner that tells you the exact processes you need to put in place to be compliant? All of a sudden you’re freeing up valuable resources in your company to get more clients.

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