In today’s evolving regulatory environment, financial institutions are increasingly turning to technology to manage their regulatory lifecycles effectively.
According to Ascent, automation is becoming a critical tool in this process, allowing companies to streamline operations, enhance accuracy, and maintain compliance with regulatory changes.
At the core of effective regulatory lifecycle management is the need to define and maintain an up-to-date understanding of all relevant regulations. This includes staying informed about new rules, amendments, and enforcement actions from all pertinent regulatory bodies. Establishing a reliable ‘source of truth’ ensures that corporate obligations are consistently aligned with those of regulators and that these obligations are properly reflected in company policies and controls.
One of the most significant challenges in regulatory management is the process of change management. Traditionally, this has involved laborious manual tasks such as reviewing extensive regulatory documents to determine relevance, understand new obligations, and assess the impact of these changes. This manual approach is not only time-consuming and costly but also prone to human error, which can lead to compliance discrepancies across different parts of an organization and increase the risk of regulatory scrutiny.
The transformational impact of automation in this field can be illustrated by a case study of a large North American bank that struggled with an outdated and inefficient system for managing regulatory obligations. The bank’s reliance on manual processes led to frequent inaccuracies due to misinterpretations and inconsistent revisions. By implementing AscentFocus, the bank was able to automate its regulatory lifecycle. This included creating a comprehensive inventory of obligations, assessing and remedying gaps, and eliminating outdated or irrelevant obligations. As a result, over 1,500 hidden risks were identified and addressed, significantly enhancing the bank’s regulatory compliance framework.
Moreover, AscentFocus has proven its effectiveness in automating change management routines. It facilitates the automatic updating of obligation inventories and assists in identifying the business impacts of regulatory changes. This ensures that policies and controls remain compliant before they are implemented, vastly improving operational efficiency and compliance integrity.
Another testament to the efficacy of automation came from a European bank that compared its traditional manual processes with those powered by AscentFocus. The automated processes not only matched the accuracy of the manual ones but did so with greater speed, boosting the productivity of the compliance team by 50% without compromising on integrity.
The inevitability of automation in regulatory change management is clear. As technology continues to advance, clinging to outdated manual processes is akin to still using rotary phones in the age of smartphones. Institutions that fail to adopt modern solutions will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage, wasting valuable resources in an increasingly compliance-driven world.
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