Checkbox: Risk and Compliance Automation with a No-Code Platform

With the proliferation of continual legal and regulatory changes and an increase in stakeholder expectations, organizations are facing greater scrutiny than ever. The pressure is on compliance professionals to take broader responsibility for policies, procedures, and controls to create a truly ethical business and satisfy those that hold the purse strings and balance the books. One of the biggest challenges facing compliance teams is operationalizing and monitoring the organization-wide adoption of policies and regulations. Not everybody within an enterprise is aware of today’s risks and how to best mitigate them. Compliance professionals are often inundated with FAQs and inquiries around the same, which takes up a lot of their time, pulling them away from more strategic decision-making around compliance and risk and control implementation. In essence, it’s because compliance teams still rely on manual ways of doing things. Complicating matters even further is the fact that compliance experts are a scarce resource. There is only a limited concentration of people who understand all of the policies and the governance framework.

Against this challenging backdrop, what should businesses do differently in order to keep compliance risk in check while ensuring that ethics policies are followed at every level in an organization?

Evan Wong, the co-founder, and CEO of Checkbox, an Australian-based software firm, believes the answer lies in automating and standardizing the regulatory process. This will not only minimizes the time and level of input required but also eliminates much of the ad-hoc, manual, and mundane risk and compliance processes that are often prone to human error. To that end, the firm has developed a namesake no-code expert process automation platform that empowers GRC teams to build automation tools using drag and drop. As a pioneer in expert process automation (EPA), Checkbox seamlessly integrates the concepts of forms, decision-tree, spreadsheet, workflow, document automation, and data visualization. “By using drag and drop, non-IT users can build software that automates intake and triage, the approval process, decision-making, and documentation generation, all without coding,” explains Wong.

What makes Checkbox unique is it its ability to combine forms automation, decisioning support, document automation, and workflow automation, all on a single platform to enable complete end-to-end EPA with a seamless end-user experience. Elucidating on these aspects, Wong says, “Using the forms automation feature, GRC professionals can build digital smart forms including conditional fields, Y/N, dropdowns, and free text, which are able to capture the right information the first time around.”

Checkbox’s powerful decision engine enables to automate scoring, assessments, decisioning, including calculations, decision-tree logic, digital spreadsheets, if-then logic, and more. The solution also standardizes workflows such as approvals, scheduled tasks, and reminders and automatically generates documents supporting tables, dynamic numbering, and loops with the styling client’s desire. With Checkbox in place, risk specialists and compliance teams can automatically score audits based on predetermined logic, dynamically produce bespoke documents, and ensure that the processes are compliant-by-design by building checks and controls and audit trails into their applications. In short, from collecting information and generating documents to conducting risk assessments, drawing conclusions, providing advice and answering FAQs to review and approval workflows, and conducting quality assurance and audits, Checkbox automates all compliance and risk processes. Another notable aspect of Checkbox, apart from the fact that it is no-code, is its speed of development, ease of use, and ability to combine separate technologies onto a single unified platform.

To give a better understanding of the benefits Checkbox brings to the table, Wong cites the firm’s success story with Coca-Cola Amatil, one of the largest distributors of beverages for the Coca Cola brands. Prior to Checkbox, the client faced several challenges; they had many manual tasks, end processes that would take up their compliance professional’s entire time. “Moreover, their IT team was focused on supporting core business functions, which meant that a lot of the workflow that was not high priority on their list was simply left as manual tasks,” explains Wong. In addition, because the client’s systems were static, they were unable to keep up with the rapidly evolving regulatory and business environment, particularly now in the time of COVID-19. They needed a platform that empowered their people who knew the issues and the processes best within the business to rapidly automate those processes. With the help of Checkbox, the client was able to build a proof of concept in a couple of hours and then develop over 45 applications in just six months after being on-boarded with a community of over 20 independent application developers on Checkbox within their organization. Today, the client uses Checkbox across different departments within their organization, including legal procurement and their people and culture team. In fact, one of the testimonials from Richard Conway, the deputy group general counsel and group company secretary of Coca Cola Amatil, reads, “Compared to its competitors, Checkbox excels at hitting the right balance between capability and ease of use for non-IT end users and is flexible to handle process changes without needing to re-engage with the vendor.”

For the road ahead, the firm has several plans. On one side, the team is working on reducing the time to value for its customers. “Rather than having our clients start with a blank canvas and build their processes from scratch, we are looking to speed up the process,” states Wong. The firm is excited to launch this self-service marketplace for digitized automated workflows. Alongside, Checkbox intends to aggressively expand its global footprint, particularly into the U.S., the UK, and the broader Southeast Asian market.