Enterprise Ireland backs corporate ethics and compliance platform
A team of researchers at Trinity College Dublin has secured €365,000 under Enterprise Ireland’s Commercialisation Fund to develop an AI-driven platform to address costly financial losses due to violations of ethics and compliance rules in large multinational companies.
IntegrityIQ will be a spin-out of Trinity Business School, supported by The Learnovate Centre.
Companies continue to suffer huge losses as a result of unethical behaviour. Last year, 16 Wall Street firms were fined a combined $1.8 billion because of inappropriate staff behaviour despite having existing regulatory and compliance training in place.
Ethics officers of large corporations struggle with two main problems in their ethics and compliance training, specifically the availability of relevant content and the delivery of effective programmes at scale. Current solutions are mostly ineffective tick-box exercises while effective customised solutions are expensive and unscalable.
The IntegrityIQ concept has been validated by global companies, who provided formal letters of support for the project. Several companies have also expressed interest in participating in pilots of the new software.
The product, which will be developed with the support of Learnovate over the next 18 months, will provide an immersive environment for employees to share perceptions about integrity risks and corporate culture and to sharpen their ethical decision-making skills in a simulated corporate environment. It will also facilitate the process to make protected disclosures (whistleblowing) and capture relevant data for internal and external reporting processes.
Learnovate will act as an incubator for the project by having its innovation services team build the product as well as handling recruitment and resource management. Over the next few months, a UX Lead, a tech lead and a Learning Lead from Learnovate will work with founder Dr Daniel Malan, a commercial lead, and trial partners to develop the software product.
Dr Malan, founder of IntegrityIQ and director of the Trinity Corporate Governance Lab at Trinity College Dublin, said: “This product fills a gap in the market. Many large multinational companies struggle with ethics and compliance training. They incur huge losses every year as a result of fraud, corruption and unethical behaviour. Companies are always looking for innovative ways to address these risks.
“We offer an affordable, customised, personalised product at scale. Essentially each employee in a company, no matter what the size of that company, will receive a personalised ethics training programme. We expect to work directly with at least seven industry partners during the development and piloting of the software.”
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