Trade Republic automates their compliance workflows with Next Matter

Trade Republic is Europe's largest savings platform that enables people to save and invest in stocks, ETFs, bonds, derivatives and crypto. With exceptional service offerings and strong customer relationships, Trade Republic has evolved rapidly, driven by impressive growth and increasing customer demand for faster and better access to the financial system.

Having successfully obtained their full banking license from the European Central Bank, Trade Republic is now positioned to offer an expanded range of banking products and services. This expansion however, will also invite heightened regulatory scrutiny.

To ensure compliance with increasingly stringent regulatory requirements while maintaining service quality, Trade Republic introduced Next Matter. With workflows spearheaded internally by Manuel Fraga, Strategic Operations Manager at Trade Republic, their anti-financial crime (AFC) processes have been supplemented with Next Matter workflow automation to deliver full compliance in areas related to regulatory compliance. This milestone has marked a significant turning point in Trade Republic's journey towards making all processes audit-ready and scalable for continued growth.

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The world of Fintech

Neobanks like Trade Republic have revolutionized the banking sector, representing the next wave of financial innovation. These banks leverage open banking to facilitate collaboration between financial institutions and third-party providers, broadening access and delivering new banking products to consumers across the world.

While accessible and user-friendly products have made daily transactions easier, they have also attracted increased regulatory attention. Although other fintechs (crypto, payments, trading) have operated with limited or “mixed” regulation, neobanks are subject to the same rigorous rules as traditional financial institutions.

For FinTech firms like Trade Republic, operating across various regions in Europe with differing regulations poses a significant challenge. However, they've had remarkable success by firmly prioritizing their exceptional product offering and customer needs, while maintaining a strong focus on compliance and continuously striving for improvement. This approach has earned them the approval of the federal bank of Germany (Bundesbank) and BAFIN, Germany's integrated financial regulatory authority, fostering trust among users and regulators, all while providing exceptional service to their clients.

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Trade Republic's workflow challenges

We have regular audits, and if we didn't have the right systems and processes it could be a critical issue problem. We have to meet a series of very hard criteria from regulators to maintain our license and keep our business running.

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Manuel Rodriguez Fraga, Strategic Operations Manager at Trade Republic

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Trade Republic has demonstrated ingenuity in overcoming the challenges of evolving FinTech regulations. They recognize the criticality of maintaining compliance in financial services, where non-compliance can result in substantial fines and irreparable damage to reputation. To ensure adherence to super strict regulatory requirements, particularly from bodies like BaFin, Trade Republic has developed advanced algorithms and tools for their internal AFC teams. 

Trade Republic encountered a challenge in meeting the regulatory requirements of providing comprehensive documentation for investigative actions taken within their AFC processes. This documentation is essential and required for audits and proving regulatory compliance in every instance. In Trade Republic’s case, where transactional volume is high and the compliance requirements are complex and demanding, workflow automation has become an operational enabler. It’s no longer just about meeting requirements “in an automated way”, but rather using automation to satisfy complex requirements at scale.

Trade Republic’s chosen solution was to implement Next Matter, an automated process that efficiently handles cases requiring investigation for potential financial crimes, fraud and other incidents while generating audit-ready documentation for each and every step of their standard operating procedures (SOPs) removing barriers to their own growth and expansion.

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The solution: Next Matter

Trade Republic chose to go with a SOC II compliant, workflow automation solution - Next Matter - to integrate into some of their Anti-Financial Crime (AFC) processes as a proactive, end-to-end automated solution.

Trade Republic acknowledged the importance of investigative process automation to meet the stringent standards set by their regulator, BaFin. A key requirement was to provide auditors with a clear, timestamped activity log that documented every step of their AFC processes. Additionally, they needed to move fast and avoid rebuilding everything from scratch.

It was a trade-off between engineers taking 1 year to build out a whole new system, or having Next Matter deliver it in less than one 1 month. We needed to move fast while maintaining the highest quality possible, so Next Matter became our go-to.

‍Manuel Rodriguez Fraga, Strategic Operations Manager at Trade Republic

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Next Matter's automated workflows became an invaluable ally in this regard. With seamless integration and robust APIs, Trade Republic enhanced their existing workflows without incurring any downtime during implementation. 

By implementing compliance-proof process automation and eliminating the risk of any step or item falling through the cracks, Next Matter has empowered Trade Republic to operate at scale while ensuring compliance. This automated alternative to manual work has enabled their team to seamlessly utilize event-based triggers and initiate follow-on investigative actions, per their fraud prevention SOPs. Trade Republic has now significantly improved operational accuracy and efficiency while enabling their teams to scale process execution in a cost-efficient way, without the need for more spending on manpower.

The results

We're now aiming to automate 80% of the manual work so that we can be more cost effective with our compliance operations.

‍Manuel Rodriguez Fraga, Strategic Operations Manager at Trade Republic

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Trade Republic has seen significant improvements since using Next Matter to manage AFC workflows. Next Matter workflows provide their team with audit-ready activity logs and prescriptive operating procedures, and every step is recorded on Next Matter. It also enforces that SOPs are upheld in investigative processes, and there's no need to double check if a case was handled or documented correctly. By using Next Matter, Trade Republic can clearly demonstrate continuous adherence to their comprehensive process documentation. Every instance of workflow usage is time stamped and recorded.

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Now with Next Matter, data is produced daily so that when regulators come to us, we can show them every instance of every process, even if they want to see proof from a 3-month period or more.

‍Manuel Rodriguez Fraga, Strategic Operations Manager at Trade Republic

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The platform offers a range of features and benefits for Trade Republic. It provides real-time tracking and reporting of workflows for Process Leads and Compliance Managers. Fundamentally, the platform enables automation of complex sequences of team, system, and external tasks, eliminating manual errors in compliance-sensitive work. Lastly, in addition to timestamped documentation of steps and workflow instances, Next Matter also offers a change log with version control, showing exactly when workflows were modified, and allowing users to reinstate previous versions of a workflow. 

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Next Matter enabled us to go from idea, to working process, to go-live with a reliable solution in a matter of days. That kind of speed and resource efficiency is highly valuable.

‍Manuel Rodriguez Fraga, Strategic Operations Manager at Trade Republic

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For fast-growing fintechs like Trade Republic, however, Next Matter's central benefit is arguably the ability to build, iterate, and launch processes rapidly, and iterate as-you-go. This capability has strengthened Trade Republic's in-house engineering team, while still reinforcing strict compliance with regulations.

Through the integration of Next Matter, Trade Republic has strengthened their operations and maintained control over their own narrative, effectively navigating the complex compliance landscape. This has enabled them to continue growth and expansion of their product offerings, uninhibited by compliance operations.