The evidence problem: what happens when someone asks you to prove it

Most brokers run good processes. Considerably fewer can demonstrate them quickly.

The gap between doing something properly and being able to show that you did it properly is where a surprising amount of cost sits, and it tends to be invisible until a request lands. A regulator asks. An insurer audits. A corporate client’s procurement function sends a questionnaire. A prospective acquirer starts diligence. In each case the question is not whether you did the work. It is whether you can produce the evidence without stopping everything else.

Why it takes so long

Because evidence is usually assembled rather than produced.

The record of a decision lives in an email. The reason for a recommendation lives in a file note, or in the adviser’s memory. The check that was performed lives in a separate tool with its own log. The approval lives in a chain of replies. All of it exists, and none of it is in one place, so demonstrating a single client journey means someone reconstructing it from four systems and asking two colleagues what they remember.

Multiply that by a sample of thirty files and you have lost a fortnight of senior time. Worse, the reconstruction itself introduces doubt: if it takes you two weeks to show what happened, the reviewer reasonably wonders how well it was controlled at the time.

Three practical tests

Pick a client at random and reconstruct the last renewal end to end. What was recommended, why, who approved it, what the client was told, when. How long did that take, and how many places did you have to look?

Now do the same for a file handled by someone who has since left. This is the version that matters, because it removes the memory of the person who did the work and leaves only what the systems retained.

And check whether your evidence is a by-product or a project. If demonstrating compliance requires a separate effort from doing the work, that effort will keep recurring, and it will always land in a month when you are busy.

The structural version of the answer

Evidence gets easier when the work happens in one place. Not because a system makes you more compliant, but because a decision recorded where it was made carries its own context, timestamp and author, and nothing has to be reassembled later.

That is a reason to care about how consolidated your operations are that has nothing to do with efficiency. A group running three back offices has three evidence trails, and any question that crosses entities requires all three to be reconciled before it can be answered at all.

Where we sit

tigerlab builds a broker management system organised around the client and the cover, where transactions, checks and approvals are recorded against the record they belong to rather than in parallel systems. The aim is that audit readiness is a default state rather than a periodic project. The platform is aligned with EU intermediary obligations, AML and DORA controls.

We are not going to claim that software makes a firm compliant. It does determine how long it takes to prove it.