I recently had the chance to visit with 6clicks co-founder Ant Stevens, as we look down the road for what will be next for 6clicks, for a sponsored podcast series. You can check out the podcast here. Stevens said that 6clicks was founded some two and half years ago to bring an affordable, accessible and easy to use, GRC capability to lots of businesses around the world. The second related mission “was to ensure that the platform was effective in driving productivity gains for both businesses and advisors and by advisors such as lawyers, accountants, general business management consultants and business advisors. These goals were achieved through a platform built from the ground up. We thought about GRC, we identified some things that were necessary for us to have in place to compete effectively in the market.”
There are other areas which Stevens believes are necessary to support the next generation of GRC products. 6clicks broke down the foundational building blocks into effectively four areas. The first was a functionality that supports the processes related to GRC. The second was content; “audit and assessment templates, risk libraries, policies, and controls sets, standards, rules, and regulations, basically all of the text or the reference points that companies need in order to make that functionality work.”
Next Stevens said, “we saw the future and we certainly see the future as having artificial intelligence baked into lots of areas of the products and the reason for that.” This last component allows a compliance or GRC professional “to take complex activities or time-consuming activities and make them a lot easier.” All of this is built around 6clicks platform, or “what we call a hub and spoke type approach which I know you discussed in Part 1 with Joe Schorr.” This makes the tool quite “useful for multinationals, with lots of divisions, useful for private equity companies, useful for holding companies. These are the four building blocks that 6clicks focuses on and we keep making those things better. That is what creates a foundation for us in terms of innovation.”
We turned specifically to AI. Here Stevens sees the application of AI into two buckets. The first is to help businesses automate or streamline what otherwise would be a complex and time-consuming activity. The second is to identify things in data that even a professional would struggle to do effectively, without the use of some sort of technology. That is what I have called ‘finding patterns in raked leaves.’
Here Stevens turned to Haley, the 6clicks AI intelligence engine. Now “Haley helps companies with two major challenges. One is to identify similarity across standards, laws, or regulations that they need to comply with. Most are still doing this using manually spreadsheets, multiple tabs and feed lookups. There is overlap across multiple jurisdictions around the world which are generally seeking to do similar things. Businesses need to think about that in a unified way. Haley’s first application is identifying similarity across standards, laws or regulations. The second challenge is to take an existing control framework within a company and quickly identify where the gaps are relative to a standard law regulation.”
These functions are what compliance and GRC professionals do all the time. While they can do  this manually with “Haley you can do that in seconds. I think the opportunity in the GRC space is to continue to apply artificial intelligence and those sorts of ways. But also to start to think about how we can use artificial intelligence to identify trends in data or insights into data that otherwise would be difficult to identify.” Stevens provided the example of taking incidents and looking for those that might be demonstrating a broader trend or an issue within an organization. Alternatively, trying to understand overlap between different risks so we can develop treatment plans and remediation activities can be more effectively targeted.
I asked Stevens if he could look down the road a bit and perhaps give us a teaser about what 6clicks might be developing. He said, “it is around our mission focusing on making GRC affordable and accessible for businesses. In the long-term, I think there is much to further automate processes for advisors, and we’re going to focus on that. To me that represents huge opportunity for innovation. We are going to look at tools, techniques to enable GRC professionals make all of this more of a reality.” Another initiative is what Stevens termed “a marketplace” which can be “be tailored by advisors for their clients. What we want to do is take this concept to the next level and allow individuals to seamlessly share, as part of their community, in a crowdsource context, both content and best practices that they have identified within the 6clicks platform and make that available to all the 6clicks users around the world.” Most excitingly for me Stevens added, “we want to bring that same sort of capability into the world of risk and compliance.”
I concluded by asking Stevens about his innovation philosophy ensuring you hit the mark, in innovation recognizing there are multiple players just in the innovation process in the GRC and wider risk and compliance space. He said, “for us at 6clicks, we have a three horizon model in the way that we think about innovation. The first is to focus obviously on the very immediate needs that customers have things that might not be working the way they expect, to things that could be improved very obviously based on feedback. The second is things in the near term, which is a combination of things that people have told us that they need and things they have expressed some sort of interesting having.” The third and final horizon is a combination of the 6clicks “view of where the opportunity lies in terms of improvement. We strike a balance in being sufficiently bold about the future that we see, but at the same time grounded in it and getting feedback from customers. In this third horizon we think about innovation manner, as in the way that we think the world should work, which requires a lot of creativity.”
Stevens ended by relating “we try and get the balance right there. It’s not easy. It’s very tough. But that is the way we think about our engineering philosophy and innovation philosophy. It influences the type of people that we attract or that are keen to work with us. We share that focus of short, medium, long-term thinking.”
For more information on 6clicks, check out their website here.