Interview with Tori Reichamn

How Vault Platform is helping to capture incidents of workplace misconduct.

It’s often claimed that the tech industry can solve almost any issue, be it infrastructural, social, political or economic…

Our latest Founders’ Insights interview is a prime example of tech extending into new and vital territory – and succeeding. Tori Reichman is the VP Commercial of Vault Platform, a workplace misconduct platform built on the back of the #MeToo movement. It’s an app that helps to reduce abuses of power within companies by offering a better, safer, simpler way to report misconduct.

This fascinating conversation explains how it works, why it’s having such a positive impact and how this remarkable marketplace is evolving. 

How about an easy one to start: what was the background to setting up the company?

So, against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, there was outrage and a little bit of frustration that this behaviour continues to exist in the world of work and that the problem hasn't been fixed yet. And that led the founders down a series of questions, like why is this still a problem? And how can we do something about it? 

There was some personal experience there as well that led to this being a particular topic of interest. So the founders who happened to be a couple, were kind of watching the Harvey Weinstein case unfold and thought, gosh, there's got to be a better way to tackle this. And there's got to be a way of using technology to connect the dots between all of these voices who weren't ready to come forward, but would have done.

And then we learned very quickly that this was not a problem limited to sexual harassment, but spans all forms of workplace misconduct, including bullying, discrimination, harassment, and the world of financial misconduct – whether that's theft or fraud, or even money laundering. We learned very quickly that there was an opportunity to disrupt an existing market that was failing companies and people.

Have you noticed any big changes in the market or ecosystem since you set the company up? 

Yeah. Even when I joined, which was in June 2019, the conversation was largely around education. We were educating stakeholders, we were educating the market, on why this was important. 

That changed pretty shortly after I joined. We saw that we weren't spending our time educating; we were spending our time selling and focusing on product and actually competing. So we saw other companies with the same idea popping up in the market. They don't do it the way we do it, but we saw them. 

We also realised quite quickly that we were disrupting the telephone hotline market, which we didn't think we were doing at the outset. We knew we were creating something new, but we were also disrupting a market. And so the conversation has shifted massively from education to innovation.

And is there any reason that the HQ is in London rather than in the US – given the US market seems a little more sophisticated?

Interestingly, the tech competitors that we have aren't exclusively US based; they're actually global tech competitors. But the reason the company HQ is in London is because that's where the founders were living at the time, and there's a huge UK and European market.

The EU whistleblowing directive, for example, which is coming into force from December 2021, states that all companies over 250 employees must have an internal tool to capture reports of misconduct. And by 2023, all companies over 50 employees across the EU must have a solution. 

And then similarly within the US there continues to be evolving regulation legislation. The historical companies, the incumbents in the US, are the telephone hotline providers and they were born off the back of SOX regulation and Dodd Frank regulation. But they are telephone hotline providers and they're just outdated. 

So being in the UK gives us a unique opportunity to look at the entirety of the world, and to have talent across the world that can really focus on how the product needs to evolve and how the market is evolving – and not just from a US perspective.

That's fascinating. So every company's going to have to have some form of software or technology to allow them to capture cases of misconduct? What’s the alternative to Vault? Add an extra service to existing HR software?

The alternative to Vault would be to partner with multiple providers.

There are a couple of tech competitors offering intake tools. Vault is unique because it is an end to end solution – and not simply an intake tool. So you have an intake method that comes from employees, as well as members of the public or a customer, company, supplier or vendor. This captures their cases, but Vault is different because it then has a resolution hub, which helps the company investigate and manage the case of misconduct.

And then it has the third component: an insights dashboard. So at board level, they can actually get a snapshot of company health. And the existing competitors today don't have the case management capability, or you have the incumbent, which is the telephone provider, which means literally, you have to pick up a phone or use a web form to submit your case of misconduct. And you're treated kind of like a ticket; you get a ticket number and then they have a case management system run by a third party. Those telephone hotline providers outsource the investigation to a third party. 

With Vault the customer is able to manage the cases of misconduct internally. It puts you closer to your employees and helps build trust and transparency within the organisation before employees get frustrated and either leave or go public to the news, which is what we continue to see across all industries and types of misconduct.

You know, I thought as soon as I saw what you did, this is going to be needed by everybody. You've got a window now where you're ahead of the curve…

That's one of the reasons that the whistleblowing directive is so valuable to us, because like with GDPR, there will be the fines and the demand on companies to comply with it. So there is going to be the pull as well as the push. So it's not just for companies who want to do well, but actually companies will need a system in place. 

And then if you think about the Volkswagen example from a few years ago where they had some fraud and defects that weren't surfaced, if you had had the ability for this matching technology that we have today to put those different incidents of misconduct together, you could have prevented the scandal that that came to be.

Is there any reason that Vault wouldn't be the go-to platform for this?

No, the only barrier is brand recognition. The HR buyers are buying from a people perspective, but, you know, HR people like to have references and it takes time to build up reference ability. But Vault is building that validation now through customers like Airbnb, M&C Saatchi and the Telegraph Media Group.

How has the COVID period changed things?

If anything, it's increased the need for it, because if you think about the shift to remote working, misconduct is not as obvious and as easy to spot from a company's perspective as it was previously. 

So previously, if someone was being harassed in the office, there's a chance that someone else might see it. You might have a witness or you might see the impact that bullying has on one of your employees. You might notice they are less motivated or struggling on a day to day basis. But the incidents of discrimination, bullying, even domestic violence have increased for employees who are now stuck at home in a world where they weren't before. 

There's also the fact that employers now are legally obliged to protect workers. And that doesn't change just because people are out of sight. So people, companies, employers will need to take more care during these times than they had before, and Vault helps them.

Are you going to build a new product for remote working or would it just be the same software as before?

Good question. The great thing about Vault as an app is that it works for people. It works for companies who are full time in the office together. It works for fully distributed organisations. The tool is configurable for the company to reflect their own code of ethics or code of conduct and the types of misconduct they want to hear about. But the tool works just as it was designed for both of these situations.

And to be clear, who has access to this product?

Every employee of the whole company, from CEO to cleaners. So we price on a headcount model. It's accessible for all employees, because the idea is that it's like insurance. You want everyone to have access to it, but you hope nobody uses it.

And who processes entries? Do they go directly to HR?

The company configures the case management and the reading. So whatever the company's current processes for where incidents would go to, you can transpose that onto Vault.

For a change of pace, any podcasts you listen to? I'm always curious about what people listen to and read nowadays…

So I got really into Masters of Scale. Yeah, that's good. I think also How I Built This I've found fascinating. And then for slightly more lighthearted listening, the West Wing Weekly before it finished, and I got really into the Telegraph's Fashion Unzipped podcast that was created by a friend of mine. 

Any good books you picked up during lockdown?

During lockdown? I have two toddlers, so no, I spent my time very locked down, making sure they stayed happy. But I am in the midst of reading, like everybody else, Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race. And also I read a book called The Choice by Edith Edgar. So she has become a therapist and essentially a motivational speaker. But she was in prison during the Holocaust when she was a very little girl. Wow, it’s a great book. 

I should also say that I'm massively into Peloton; huge enthusiast for at-home cycling. I got it a year ago and I'm obsessed. 

And what do you do? You get to choose what classes you go on each day?

Yeah. It's on demand. So you can take live classes, but they have everything on demand. So this morning, for example, I took a class that was recorded in February. And it was a black history month theme. And so it was actually a journey through hip hop from the eighties to the present day; from East coast to West coast. It was awesome and it was 30 minutes and I had to hold myself back from singing, because my husband was asleep in our flat!

If you’d like to demo Vault Platform or discuss how it works in further detail, get in touch and we’ll connect you directly.