How Regtech Helps Compliance & Risk Teams to Collaborate on Regulatory Change Management

One of the reasons that regulatory change management can be difficult for businesses to manage is that it requires coordination between multiple departments within the organization. If there are changes in regulations that affect the organization then the change management team will have to assess the changes and then create a an implementation plan. This requires the change management team to coordinate with the compliance and risk teams. The compliance team must ensure that the procedures followed within the organization are compliant with the new or updated regulatory requirements and the risk team must ensure that the risks posed by the changes are quickly mitigated.

This isn’t where the collaboration ends; these three teams must then coordinate with the different business units within the organization to implement the changes as required. Most banks deal in multiple type of banking products for example, whenever there are regulatory changes, the banks must first assess the extent of the changes to understand which business units are affected by the changes and in what way. The risk, compliance, and change management teams must coordinate with all the business units that require changes. This quickly becomes a complicated and confusing process with a potential of human error further complicating things.

Ineffective Collaborations Hinder Regulatory Change Management

When organizations try to manage regulatory changes using general-purpose email, word processing, and spreadsheet management software the entire process can become ineffective. Think of all the coordination that is required to manage the changes – all of it happens through emails or discussed within meetings. Both these ways of communication have their own faults. If the collaboration is happening through email chains, the advantage is that there is a record of the discussions taking place. The disadvantage, however, is that these conversations are spread out in multiple email threads across different inboxes within the organization. This makes it difficult to perform root cause analysis for audits if something goes wrong.

Discussing the changes through meetings creates its own problems. While the communication is effective and in real-time, there isn’t much of a record of the discussion that took place, which makes it difficult to assess where things went wrong when an audit is performed months later. These problems occur when discussing what needs to be done. However, once the plan is decided and everyone knows what needs to be done, there is still the problem of managing the progress on change management activities.

Monitoring Change Management Progress

When regulatory change management is being managed manually, management has little visibility into how the process is progressing. The managers within the organization must rely on updates provided by departmental heads to understand the extent of the work that has been completed. This means that if a department is making a mistake, the manager will not be aware of the mistake until it is self-reported to them by the department or until another department (usually the compliance or risk management team) detects the problem and notifies all the stakeholders. Another major problem is that multiple discussions may take place about a single task involving different people, which means that the people who are supposed to collaborate on achieving a single goal may be working with conflicting understandings of what needs to be done.

How Regtech Simplifies Collaboration

Modern regulatory change management solutions simplify regulatory change management by eliminating the biggest time-sinks and obstacles to effective change management. Modern Regtech solutions allow businesses to integrate risk, compliance, and change management under one platform. This solves many of the issues that can occur when these three teams collaborate. When everything is being managed under one platform, actions and insights are visible to all the involved parties within the process. So, when the change management team uploads its assessment of the changes to the regulatory change management solution, the information is instantly shared with the other teams in their compliance management solution and risk management solution.

All the discussions take place within the platform as well, resulting in a more streamlined workflow. When someone in the change management team sees a regulatory update that affects an existing control within the organization, they can highlight it within the platform and start a discussion right there about what needs to be done to mitigate it. This means that if there is ever a need to go back to the discussion to understand any mistakes, then all the discussions that took place will be visible within the platform since every action leaves an audit trail.

Managers can also manage the progression of change management activities across the organization much more effectively. Instead of relying on self-reporting by the different departments, managers get a real-time view of all the activities currently taking place to manage regulatory changes and drill-down to any activity they want more information on.

Interested in seeing how your organization can benefit from better regulatory change management tools? Get in touch with our RCM experts for a demonstration of Predict360, our risk and compliance intelligence suite with a dedicated regulatory change management and intelligence module.