Five years ago, we established PX Partners with a clear mission: to provide an alternative to the traditional consulting model by delivering practitioner led, client aligned, practical and sustainable solutions.
What began as a boutique consultancy has since grown into a trusted partner for a diverse portfolio of clients across the financial services landscape and beyond – particularly in funds management, superannuation, and insurance. Because we put our clients and their end-customers at the centre of our work, we’re proud to report that over 90% of our engagements come from our existing clients and referrals by our clients.
Along the way, we’ve navigated a global pandemic, regulatory upheavals and generational changes in technology. While the world around us has changed, our commitment has remained constant.
As we celebrate this milestone, we’re sharing five things we’ve learnt from our first 5 years supporting clients.
You can’t do more with less
One of the classic refrains in corporate life when costs are being cut. The need to do more with less. Which is a complete furphy. You can only do less with less. And that’s okay, as long as it’s transparent.
Cutting budgets for Risk and Compliance teams at a time when the regulatory burden is increasing is a fast track to bad outcomes. If you think compliance is expensive, try non-compliance!
Risk leaders need to be clear that having less means doing less – fewer controls monitored, slower incident response and less proactive risk identification. This isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about recalibrating expectations and being clear about what can realistically be achieved with the resources available.
This is not to say that you can’t find ways to make your processes more efficient and embrace new technologies. We have and continue to iterate and improve how we operate to deliver benefits to our clients and Risk & Compliance teams have a really important role to play here – not just in supporting or challenging business teams with risk-in-change and vendor oversight but also in surfacing solutions that can make risk and compliance processes more efficient.
At PX Partners, we’re lucky to be doing more with more having grown our team from our founding two to a team of twelve today across both Sydney and Melbourne.
Don’t fear the tough decisions
Governance around decision making is a key enabler of business success. We have seen so many examples (usually through court action by Regulators) of firms deferring and delaying making critical business decisions.
Whether it is a decision where to invest resource and effort or to make a difficult decision to exit a product or business line, those who are successful have the structures and governance in place to:
- Gather the right information
- Get it to the right people
- Do it in a timely fashion
- Commit and execute
- Learn from the experience.
Don’t let decision making be paralysed by Committees – good governance around decision making means empowered and accountable executives and not deference to Committee structures. Committees have an important role to play but should be used sparingly and not as a default.
In our own business, ensuring we align to our values helps guide our decisions and makes them easier. Our decisions are centred on being fair to ourselves and our clients, making things better, and being real and transparent about the reasons. That doesn’t mean decisions are easy, but anchoring to these values has resulted in fast alignment around difficult decisions.
People over technology every time
Now more than ever before, firms are looking to technology to deliver efficiencies and reduce cost. The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence has only super charged this shift. The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is rife – firms are rushing to do something in the fear of being left behind. Technology is an enabler, not a silver bullet. Because at the end of the day, technology should serve people and strategy and not the other way around.
Take this thought experiment. How would you feel if we offered you a robot to do a bunch of your usual tasks well? Brilliant, we assume, as you could spend time doing more satisfying things. What if we instead offered your boss a robot to do your job well? Threatened or insecure perhaps? At PX Partners, we have been in the fortunate position to start with a blank slate unencumbered by legacy technology and systems. We want technology to serve our team and clients and therefore encourage our team to automate and streamline what they can and do it transparently and with accountability.
We have embraced technology to enable our team in supporting clients. Our Know Your Distributor (KYD) solution is a prime example: designed in collaboration with product issuers and distributors, KYD helps streamline due diligence for the whole industry.
No set and forget
In financial services, there’s often a trigger for refreshing risk frameworks, and most recently, APRA’s CPS 230 has prompted firms to take a hard look at their operational resilience and third-party risk settings. But this shouldn’t be a one-off exercise. Risk management is a verb not a framework.
This takes effort from the Boardroom to the front line. And deliberate focus. The tone from the top matters and sets the standard for the firm.
What does good risk management look like? Don’t overthink it – just start with something. Start measuring things – are they useful? If not, change it. Do you need a forum to discuss key risks? Set it up. If it’s not working, change it. It’s a verb. Just do it. Set a process and repeat it, improve it and reap the benefits.
At PX Partners, our risk mindset is essential to how we run our business. We take risks. We learn and respond. As a business servicing regulated clients, we have a high bar to meet. In truth, these are no higher than standards we set for ourselves – to keep improving. It underpins how we serve clients, manage our own business and partnerships, and make decisions. By treating risk as a continuous practice, we stay agile, accountable, and aligned with our mission to deliver trusted outcomes in a complex and evolving world.
Compliance does not conflict with customer outcomes
Doing the right thing always wins in the end. It might not always seem that way but it is true.
We see compliance not as a constraint, but as a catalyst for better customer outcomes. In financial services, it can often feel that compliance with regulatory requirements is just that – a tick the box exercise. But it is not just about meeting the regulatory requirements, it’s about building trust, transparency, and resilience. When compliance is embedded thoughtfully into processes, it strengthens the quality and reliability of the products & services. Regulatory enforcement is littered with examples of firms who should have invested early in robust compliance and governance – from fees for no service to recent MIS failures. A commitment to meaningful compliance from all firms in the chain could have avoided these adverse outcomes for clients.
At PX Partners, we are hugely proud of the level of repeat client work. We don’t shy away from telling our clients what we think is right for them and their end customers. These clients are working with our team to invest in governance, risk and compliance to uplift and enhance what they do which ultimately benefits end customers.