The need to satisfy a regulator, or meet legally binding deadlines creates a difficult balancing act for professional service firms.

The regulator’s process is easy to see, so it is much easier to build a business around satisfying their requirements. Effectively the firm becomes not much more than an interface, taking information from a widely disparate set of clients and reshaping it to meet a required format.

One danger is that if every firm looks like this, prospects are going to buy on price.

Another is that once compliance can be automated or outsourced, the firm’s purpose effectively disappears.

Now might be a good time to start re-framing.