As the UK government aims to reform the financial sector, financial institutions (FIs) face a golden opportunity where they can build a competitive advantage over their competitors by converting compliance management from a costly process to a more value-oriented one to lower costs and improve operational efficiency.
However, to turn compliance into an advantage, institutions need to modernise their compliance processes to ensure that they can adjust their internal operations. Modernising compliance leads to lower costs and more agile processes that would allow FIs to adapt internal processes quickly, which is precisely what is needed to stay up to date with a changing sector.
Modernising compliance requires investment into RegTech. Over the past few years, RegTech has been making waves within the finance sector for its ability to reduce the cost of compliance and optimise its workflows, turning a process that would usually eat into budgets into one that would contribute to it. One such technology is the reg tracker technology – the platform that could capture regulatory updates and relay them directly to compliance teams.
In this blog, we will explain how a reg tracker can modernise compliance management and help FIs meet their regulatory demands.
Automate compliance operations
Regulatory tracking technology can help FIs convert compliance monitoring into a more cost-efficient agile process. Instead of having compliance officers searching for regulatory updates, where they would spend hours sifting through content to find the latest updates, the tracking platform can search for these updates and alert compliance teams. Since the trackers use technology, such as AI and NLP, they can find regulatory updates at a fraction of the time it would take a compliance officer to complete the process. Digitising this process allows institutions to speed up time-consuming processes, like compliance monitoring and approvals, optimising their compliance procedures.
With your compliance officers free of the time-consuming task of finding regulatory updates, it frees them up to do more critical work, such as assessing updates. Not all updates have an equal impact on internal operations. Some updates may not be relevant to an institution, while others might realign their operations. Determining which update falls into which category is the responsibility of compliance officers. Since they are no longer burdened with finding updates, officers can now pour more time and attention into determining how these updates could affect internal operations, allowing institutions to adjust operations faster and improving their ability to respond to an update.
Manual regulatory management is filled with inaccuracies, redundancies, and inefficient processes. For example, it is not unusual for a compliance team to miss a regulatory update or to draw an incorrect conclusion about how relevant an update is to the organisation. When an error occurs, it places institutions in a difficult position where they face a costly fine over a misunderstanding. However, reg tracking can automate much of the process, eliminating delays, inaccuracies, and redundancies and turning compliance into manual procedures that allow organisations to better understand updates faster. This would prevent costly fines and penalties while turning compliance management into a more efficient process.
Get swift alerts on regulatory developments
Obtaining the latest regulatory updates is one of the biggest value propositions for any FI. With several organisations operating around the world, it can be difficult for compliance teams to account for updates from different institutions. While the UK government is aiming for ambitious reforms, organisations have to account for updates from institutions based in the EU and in other regions if they are operating there. A manual process can prove to be problematic because compliance officers could miss an update, despite their best efforts or misunderstand their relevance to the institution. A reg tracker solution can perform the work of several officers, scanning different sources and relaying these updates directly to officers. Automating the process would ensure that the institution does not miss an update.
Real-time alerts also help institutions augment their risk management process. With regulatory alerts coming in real-time, institutions will have access to the latest information, improving the ability to identify compliance gaps and shore them up. Augmenting risk management allows organisations to amp up their compliance procedures and ensure they do not suffer costly penalties.
However, it is not just a question of tracking different institutions around the world. Your compliance team can leverage the platform to scan different sources. A significant roadblock to capturing updates is the lack of a central source for these updates. Regulatory updates are found in different sources that include official web pages and PDF documents. Scanning these lengthy pages or documents for relevant information was a time-consuming process that turned compliance into an inefficient process. However, since regulatory tracking platforms could scan different sources for relevant updates, it helped eliminate the inefficiency and redundancy of the process. It also meant that compliance officers no longer had their time and talents wasted on a mundane process, for they could be directed towards more valuable work.
With the ability to identify and track new updates, compliance officers can use the insight as a starting point to assess developments, upgrades, and reforms relevant to the organisation. They can examine how the industry is developing by studying the new updates to determine where the sector is moving towards. Moreover, the institutions can streamline compliance procedures using regulatory tracker solutions. These platforms are built using NLP and machine learning, which can assess regulatory text to identify how an update is connected to internal operations. Institutions can automate part of the regulatory rule mapping process to easily identify and organise the relevant regulatory content and see how they are connected to internal operations. They can develop a better understanding of what needs to be done to adjust internal operations to meet compliance requirements. Furthermore, the platform allows compliance officers to organise regulatory updates into a taxonomy in a common language that all users can access. This improved compliance management processes while reducing costs, empowering organisations to better respond to the latest updates.
Ensure continuous compliance
Using a reg tracker allows institutions to modernise their compliance management processes. The automated platform can help you better understand the current compliance status by assessing your procedures with a comprehensive audit, revealing gaps and other flaws that could undermine your process. By relaying data through this automated solution, your compliance team will be empowered to make data-driven decisions regarding their compliance management procedures. Moreover, adopting a more data-driven approach to compliance makes the process more efficient and timely while giving you a more objective view of compliance.
Furthermore, this automated assessment can take place on a single dashboard, which serves to further streamline the process. Instead of a manual audit where compliance teams have to collect documents from different business units and assess them to ensure they comply, the team can conduct quick, efficient reviews through the dashboard. Compliance officers can receive instant alerts through the dashboard on the different business units and departments, making it easier to ensure if these different bodies are following compliance procedures without devoting hours to manually assessing data. The dashboard goes a long way in modernising compliance management because it centralises and streamlines compliance management.
Moreover, a reg tracker can continuously track and monitor compliance processes through automated ongoing audits. With this solution, FIs can leave behind manual auditing processes that take a significant amount of time and effort. Since the solution can continuously audit different sources for the latest updates, it can also audit your own internal compliance processes. Real-time, continuous assessment of internal compliance can reveal gaps and other flaws in the compliance process. This would help streamline internal auditing while improving its effectiveness, reducing costs and helping you prevent penalties in the future.
Since reg alert solutions use machine learning and AI, institutions can take advantage of this process to simplify compliance management. Rather than manually assessing and breaking down regulatory updates, it is possible to save time and improve efficiency by using the tracker platform. The solution can convert large volumes of complex text into obligation summaries and highlight relevant rulings. This can help financial institutions perform multiple functions more efficiently. For example, compliance officers can interpret regulatory content faster and determine if it is relevant to them or not. Furthermore, they can assess updates and trace them to identify patterns in reforms, allowing them to take a more proactive approach to compliance. Finally, it will be easier to make necessary changes where necessary.
Gaining an advantage during a turbulent time
Recent exogenous events have rocked the UK’s financial industry, triggering a landslide of reforms and changes. Even though it took place more than two years ago, the influence of Brexit still looms large over the industry, with the government looking to reform the sector free from the EU’s influence. Bringing about these changes, however, means triggering a series of reforms that have left the financial industry struggling.
However, by modernising compliance management with a reg tracker, it is possible for financial institutions to successfully navigate this turbulent environment while also building a competitive advantage that would put them ahead of their peers by converting financial regulation into a more value-oriented process instead of a costly one.
