Ex-president and CEO of SunGard Cristóbal Conde returns to financial technology as executive chairman for regulatory compliance start-up True Office.
Cristóbal Conde,
executive chairman,
True Office
Former president and CEO of SunGard, Cristóbal Conde has returned to what he missed—helping grow a financial technology start-up—by taking on the role of part-time executive chairman for True Office, a New York-based provider of regulatory training via mobile compliance games.Conde says he will be mentoring True Office’s CEO and management team on how to achieve rapid growth with a focus on the distribution of the company’s apps, possible acquisitions, and the leveraging of the sales channels that already exist with anti-money laundering (AML) and other compliance software and services providers.
“It’s refreshing to be solving small company problems for a change,” Conde says. “I always felt my roots were in the small company arena.”
Yet his tenure at software and services giant SunGard made him want to do something more about the state of regulatory and compliance training.
As CEO of SunGard, he was “shocked by the poor state of the training courses that were being offered,” Conde explains; he is no fan of the remote, online training courses. “If you test employees before and after the course, there’s no change so they got nothing out of the course—they just page through it as they pay attention to something else.”
Turning compliance training into a game is a way to jolt peoples’ attention and get them to learn, says Conde, who adds that Wall Street firms are not averse to the consumer-like approach. “I was with a pilot client—a major money center bank—where they put 400 new employees through it and the scores were off the charts in terms of the improvement,” he says. “I really believe in the gamification concept.”
“It’s refreshing to be solving small company problems for a change. I always felt my roots were in the small company arena.”
— Cris Conde, ex-CEO of SunGard and now executive chairman of True Office
For instance, if potential employers instead of asking applicants to describe themselves in two words, turn it into a game of picking exactly seven words to describe themselves, the results can be more telling. “By making it into a game—exactly seven words—then people really think about which seven words they’re going to use,” Conde says. “Then they give a much more thoughtful answer. The gamification of things is a way of engaging human beings. …If people are engaged in the course work, they will actually learn.”
The deeper engagement might also mean a more profound review of compliance issues across an enterprise, rather than a focus on “what do you have to do in order not to go to jail and for the company not to get fined,” Conde says. CEOs should be reinforcing core values rather than accepting the bare minimum when it comes to compliance training. “It’s such a shame. I feel very strongly about this.”
Conde first started working with Adam Sodowick, True Office founder and CEO at the 2012 FinTech Innovation Lab where Conde was executive-in-residence, officials say. The New York City Investment Fund and Accenture run the FinTech Innovation Lab, which promotes cutting edge technologies for the financial services industry in New York City.
Available through Apple’s App store, the True Office apps are available now for Apple’s iPad tablet. The apps will become available for non-Apple devices that support HTML5 when the fifth revision of the HTML markup language standard for the World Wide Web becomes available. The HTML5 web page application development environment sidesteps the need for Java and Flash plug-ins and will offer support for 2D graphics.
“This is a large market that has been bypassed by technology,” Conde says. “It’s really the right way to go because we are addressing a mobile workforce, which is what we have now.”
The True Office apps cover information and data security, workplace discrimination prevention, anti-bribery and corruption, HIPAA requirements, and diversity and inclusion. The True Office Apps also offer analytics intended to help clients identify risk and cost savings.
Conde’s time at SunGard began in 1987 when SunGard acquired Devon Systems International, Inc., a company that Conde co-founded and which provided systems for the interest rate and currency derivatives markets. From 2002 until May of last year, Conde held the top executive posts at SunGard, and during his executive tenure, he oversaw multiple acquisitions, took the company private in August 2005, grew revenue from $2.6 billion in 2002 to $5 billion in 2010 and expanded SunGard’s international business reach.
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