Why Brinsop Limited ?

It was early 2017 when I began sketching out a plan to set up a company from which to provide my services (compliance and regulatory in nature), but the idea first came to my mind three years before. Let me explain…..

I was heading up the compliance department at a major UK centric remote gambling operator and it was my first role in the industry after waving a fond farewell to my colleagues at the office of the Gibraltar Gambling Commissioner where I had spent a very memorable eight years.

I was struck, first of all, by the number of compliance related projects that, for a number of reasons, would spring up across the business on an ongoing basis: applications for licences, regulatory changes, new safer gambling tools and functions, building safer gambling microsites, etc., work that was intense in nature due to the tight timescales that these projects would typically be subject to, and the additional workload (to an already significant workload) colleagues in the compliance department, and other departments, would be be subjected to.

What then struck me was that notwithstanding that these projects are transient in nature (once you’ve submitted your application for a licence and (hopefully) obtained the licence, the work is done; once you’ve carried out all the technical changes required to be consistent with the new regulatory requirements, that particular stream of work is done, and so on…) there seemed to be a bias (elsewhere in the industry, I should add, not necessarily my employer at the time) to recruit new colleagues on a permanent basis to manage these projects, with the idea that they would then be available for any other compliance related projects that would spring up further down the line.

What came to my mind when I considered this was that it did not seem to me to be a smart way of working: you would end up with a significant headcount in the compliance department disproportionate to the compliance related work within the business, plus, you may have recruited someone to help with the application for a licence, but that does not mean this colleague is suitable enough to move on to a safer gambling type project or an anti-money laundering type project, etc.

What we in the industry needed, I thought, is the capability to contract third party high quality professionals to provide the resources to manage these projects instead of recruiting additional colleagues on a fixed term basis.

So when I was having coffee with a former colleague in early 2017, and he brought up the idea of setting up a company from which to provide my compliance and regulatory services, it took me all of five seconds, I think (probably less than five seconds) for me to make up my mind that this is what I would do !

And I did……and this is the reason for Brinsop Limited…..