Women in Governance, Risk and Compliance: meet Recordsure and TCC’s Joanne Smith

After being named Innovator of the Year in the Women in Governance, Risk and Compliance Awards 2021, Recordsure and TCC’s Founder and Executive Chair Joanne Smith was confirmed as a judge for the following event.

The event shines a light on female leaders, mentors and advocates making their mark on the risk and compliance sector across 17 award categories. Ahead of the shortlist announcement in September, Joanne’s award-winning journey includes her role as a judging panellist.

Meet Joanne Smith

Joanne Smith is described as an accomplished entrepreneur with more than 30 years of experience in finance, compliance and technological development, and as one of the RegTech sector’s respected and influential figures.

She began her career in leading finance companies, building hands-on knowledge of regulation and the industry’s challenges. She founded compliance consultancy TCC Group in 2001, followed by RegTech business Recordsure in 2012.

Her career has been rooted in solving a long-standing financial sector challenge: how firms can achieve efficient and effective risk management while delivering the best possible outcomes for customers at scale.

Industry firsts

Through TCC and Recordsure, Joanne has led RegTech innovation and contributed to several milestones. Her development projects have produced:

• The first face-to-face conversation recording solution that meets the security needs of financial regulators and information commissioners.
• A speech recognition system that achieves a high degree of accuracy with multi-party face-to-face conversations.
• An AI system that breaks financial conversations into component parts to support compliance, training, competency and customer insight reviews.

Recognition and equality advocacy

Joanne’s work has brought industry recognition and accolades, including Innovator of the Year at the Women in GRC Awards 2021 and Women in Compliance Awards’ Inspirational Woman of the Year.

As a member of the female business community, she has supported women in technology at forums such as Forward Ladies. She is a supporter of female founders and a serial investor in female-led technology businesses, helping address the 1% funding challenges of female entrepreneurs.

Joanne also mentors female colleagues who want to develop new solutions and challenge the status quo. Away from TCC and Recordsure, she is chair of the CBI SME council, sharing her experience of running two SME businesses to help other businesses prosper.