Case Study: Accelerating Product Delivery for a European Compliance Software Provider
Client: EQS Group - European leader in compliance and governance software
Duration: 9 months
Role: Interim Lead Product Manager
Product Focus: Third Party Vetting Software
Background
EQS Group is a prominent European software company specialising in compliance and governance solutions. Their product portfolio includes whistleblowing platforms, internal HR campaign tools, and third party vetting software. The third party vetting module enables compliance officers to conduct comprehensive background checks on potential business partners.
The third party vetting software had become the company’s main strategic focus, identified by leadership as having the greatest growth potential across the entire product portfolio. This elevated attention brought significant pressure from multiple stakeholders across the organisation, all watching closely as the product team worked to deliver on ambitious roadmap commitments.
When Value Rebels was engaged, the business was facing significant delivery pressure. Contractual commitments to key customers needed to be fulfilled rapidly, and the leadership team required focused intervention to deliver on outstanding promises. With the third party module positioned as the company’s primary growth driver, the stakes were high, not just to meet customer commitments, but to hit revenue targets and build momentum toward future commercial goals.
Dashboard overview of the third party vetting software
The engagement focused on stabilising product delivery, enhancing core functionality, and positioning the third party vetting software for cross sell opportunities. Key goals included:
Contractual delivery: To fulfil outstanding customer commitments within agreed timeframes, particularly around configurable questionnaire functionality.
Revenue target achievement: To deliver roadmap features that would drive new customer acquisition and expansion revenue, supporting the company’s growth ambitions for the product.
Cross module integration: To enable seamless integration with EQS’s policy management module, unlocking new revenue opportunities through cross selling.
Data input modernisation: To redesign input fields and workflows to reflect the product’s strategic pivot away from legacy use cases, ensuring the software aligned with current customer needs.
Self service capability: To empower customers to create and deploy fully configurable questionnaires.
Third party data provider integration: To streamline access to beneficial ownership and enhanced due diligence reports directly within the platform, reducing reliance on external tools.
Risk mitigation through workflow design: To introduce approval processes that strengthened governance and reduced the potential for fraud or compliance breaches.
Screenshot of the Form.io builder implemented into the third party vetting software
Approach
Value Rebels hit the ground running. Within the first week, they brought together cross functional stakeholders for an intensive two day workshop, cutting through the noise to establish a clear scope, untangle complexity, and set a realistic delivery timeline for semi configurable questionnaires. That early alignment across product, design, and engineering proved to be one of the most valuable investments of the engagement.
From there, the work expanded across several areas. A key early win was integrating the third party vetting module with the internal policy management system, allowing customers to create policies and distribute them directly to third parties for digital signature, complete with signature tracking and two step verification to ensure compliance and authenticity.
In parallel, the product was pivoting away from legacy use cases, which called for a ground up redesign of the input data architecture. New fields were introduced to capture the data points required for modern background checks, and a critical integration with Integrity Hub brought non compliance users, including sales and procurement teams, into the workflow, allowing them to submit third party information for vetting without needing direct access to the compliance software.
Questionnaire functionality was another area of significant advancement. Building on the initial semi configurable foundation, we implemented Form.io, giving customers full control over questionnaire design. Users could build custom questions with radio buttons, checkboxes, and dropdowns, attach scoring logic to each, and let the system automatically calculate risk scores when responses came in, substantially reducing the manual review burden on compliance teams.
External data providers were brought directly into the platform too. A third party provider for universal beneficial ownership (UBO) checks and enhanced due diligence (EDD) reports was implemented, with a second integration underway by the end of the engagement. Compliance officers could now order these reports without leaving the platform, replacing a fragmented, multi portal experience with a single unified workflow.
The final major capability started at the end of the assignment was an AI powered approval phase. Once all due diligence data had been gathered, the system aggregated it into a consolidated view and generated a recommendation to approve, reject, or flag the third party for further review. Alongside this, a two step approval workflow was implemented to strengthen governance, ensuring that the compliance officer who conducted the due diligence could not unilaterally sign off on a decision. A second, independent reviewer would always be required, meaningfully reducing the risk of bribery or oversight failures.
Results
The engagement delivered across every dimension that mattered. All outstanding contractual commitments were met within agreed timeframes. The integration between the vetting and policy management modules opened up bundled cross sell opportunities for the sales team, generating new revenue streams and deepening product stickiness. Configurable questionnaires and automated scoring cut manual effort for compliance teams, while the data provider integrations enhanced the offering significantly. The two step approval process and AI powered recommendations raised the standard of governance across the board. The Integrity Hub integration broadened the product’s reach beyond compliance teams into sales, procurement, and other business functions. And by consistently shipping roadmap features that drove both customer satisfaction and po commercial growth, the third party vetting product held its position as the company’s primary growth vehicle.
Value Rebels Insights
Several broader lessons emerged from this engagement, relevant to any B2B SaaS organisation managing complex compliance or enterprise workflows.
Taking two days at the outset to align stakeholders and clarify scope saved weeks of rework downstream, rapid clarity is a delivery accelerator, not a luxury. Connecting related modules, as demonstrated by the policy management integration, doesn’t just improve the user experience. It creates tangible commercial opportunities that product teams should be actively seeking out.
Automation, whether through questionnaire scoring or AI powered approval recommendations, reduces cognitive load while improving consistency. Compliance officers don’t want to do less work, they want to do better work. In that same vein, single person approval workflows are a liability in high risk domains. Segregation of duties should be designed into the product from the start, not bolted on later.
Finally, integration strategy deserves to be treated as a core product capability. Bringing external data providers directly into the platform eliminated context switching and positioned the product as a genuine hub for compliance work, an outcome that no amount of standalone feature development could have achieved alone.