With regulatory compliance requirements in the Asia-Pacific region becoming more complex and disruptive, existing management tools and processes may not scale to the task. Could your organisation stand to benefit from reshaping your regulatory compliance management software capabilities?
The fragmented nature of the Asia Pacific (APAC) region makes compliance, an already complex matter, even more challenging. And as regulatory transformation sweeps the region, the lack of intra-region regulatory harmonisation together with extraterritorial regulatory implications, means APAC firms have their work cut out to keep on top of evolving regulatory trends.
In order to keep pace, most companies implement a number of point systems to address specific regulations and quite often rely on one-time fixes. Additionally, these activities take place in silos, and with software partners overpromising results. Responding in this piecemeal fashion, considering the region’s environment of ongoing disruption, poorly serves the organisation, making it difficult to gain a comprehensive view of risk across the whole of its operations.
By implementing a more joined-up and integrated approach to risk management, one that facilitates a strategic and comprehensive method to risk-taking, an organisation can add competitive advantage by rapidly deploying mitigation processes and streamlining monitoring of key regulatory risks across the business, so that appropriate action can be taken where needed.
After all, operationalising compliance activities is not a one-and-done exercise; regulations such as Anti Money Laundering, Know Your Customer, Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II), Basel III and IV, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), require people, technology, data, and process involvement to be sustainable.
As a result, what we’re increasingly seeing is more APAC organisations starting to rethink the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that has typically prevailed in this region. The challenge and opportunity, therefore, is how to do they balance the rapid complexity of existing and emerging regulatory risks with cloud-based, data-led technological advancements.
How Technology Helps with the Shifting Sands of Regulation
As regulatory transformation sweeps the region, to comply – more than ever before – companies need to integrate data from many different systems, produce much more granular information for regulators at higher frequencies, all the while providing full traceability from submissions back to the underlying source data.
These new obligations are rendering legacy compliance systems and manual compliance processes obsolete. This is down to them being inherently limited in terms of extensibility and scalability to respond to new regulatory demands; making it impractical to manage the increases in data and complexity required by incoming rules.
Hence no surprise that more APAC companies are looking to invest in strategic, automated technology to comply with increasingly complex regulatory requirements, not only to avoid being caught out by wary regulators, but also to attain the levels of internal transparency needed for consistent compliance. Not only do such solutions help to reduce the potential cost of regulatory scrutiny but also to reduce the level of scrutiny.
By leveraging the power of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, solutions such as regulatory compliance management software can enhance compliance processes and reduce the regulatory burden on firms. In addition, enabling the compliance function to have the flexibility to scale up or down as needs change as well as creating greater capacity in the overall compliance system.
Through implementing regulatory compliance management solutions as part of a wider integrated risk management approach, compliance teams have access to a set of capabilities to modify, improve, and streamline information-sharing, workflows, and processes beyond the classical box-ticking exercise into a robust and dynamic compliance programme.
This more connected view of risk enables businesses to access compliance data that provides valuable insights into their businesses’ vulnerabilities – often in real-time – in a cost-effective way to identify risks, predict compliance failures and enhance coordination across all levels of the organisation with capabilities like executive dashboards.
Furcating risk information in this way allows for reporting simplification based on stakeholder needs. It also sets the framework for monitoring how the regulatory compliance risk profile changes. The same proofs of oversight and management also ensure that regulatory bodies can be appraised and informed when required, in ways according to their specific requirements.
Organisations can also affect changes to any business processes made necessary by regulatory reform, and track the effectiveness of those changes as they happen. Any changes to process can be assessed for risk too, to maintain a fully compliant stance across operations.
Regulatory compliance management solutions also make it easier and quicker to assign ownership of compliance oversight to individuals or teams, thus driving accountability and creating clear and coherent trails of responsibility; aided by managed emails and notifications, which keeps all stakeholders informed as to overall required activity and specific duties.
This not only accelerates time to value to relieve compliance teams but also offers greater efficiency and visibility within an organisation, ensuring easily traceable audit trails, improved information management and data governance.
By helping companies to document their business processes and internal control procedures, regulatory compliance management software enables compliance teams to create confidence in the company’s regulatory standing across all business functions. And ultimately, enable the company to build a solid wall of protection that reduces risks, minimises the overhead costs of governance and compliance, and provides maximum business insight across all operations.
Get in touch today to find out how SAI Global helps organisations like yours seamlessly combine regulatory content management with an intuitive workflow system to alleviate the burden of assessment and implementation of all existing and new regulations, anywhere in the world.
Source: techwireasia
