From Automation to Accountability: How Today’s Technology Manages End-to-End Regulatory Change Management

Regulatory change management lies at the intersection of several risk, compliance, and legal avenues. It involves audits, compliance documentation, risk management, change management, and other business processes.

Many of today’s technology-based regulatory change management solutions provide data customization and delivery automation for regulatory updates. These solutions address timeliness, efficiency, relevancy and accuracy challenges. However, chief compliance officers and stakeholders often manage regulatory change evaluation and implementation using manual processes rather than automated systems. Modern fintech solutions offer end-to-end regulatory change management tools that automate many manual processes and accountability reporting.

Gathering up-to-date regulatory intelligence

Acquiring current regulatory change information is the first step to proactively managing regulatory change. Creating actionable insights for regulatory change requires businesses to first acquire the latest regulatory information and then understand how the changes will affect the organization. While there is a plentitude of updates available from regulatory bodies, this information is often distributed across different methods and at varying times.

Regulatory updates are published on official government websites of agencies once they have been approved, but businesses need to know what changes to expect beforehand. Many organizations subscribe to multiple news sources to gather the information that is relevant to them. This includes trade organizations, news websites, dedicated regulatory news networks, trade publications, and more.

Extracting relevant information

Regulatory change management software solutions include a regulatory news feed that combines the most useful information from multiple sources and presents it to the users in one unified delivery mechanism. This means that instead of needing to consume and filter to determine the right information, relevant data is automatically sent to compliance personnel. These solutions often harness artificial intelligence and other modern software technologies to intelligently extract filtered information for customers. Many solutions enable organizations to filter the type of regulatory data that applies to their operations, therefore ensuring that businesses receive only the most relevant information.

Evaluating the impact of regulatory changes

The most profound change in regulatory updates occurs not in getting the right information, but in evaluating how the information impacts the organization. Once the compliance team has the right data regarding regulatory changes that apply to their businesses, they must then focus on if and how their business processes will be affected.

This can be an arduous process when performed manually as management typically crowdsources the information from business units. The regulatory updates are sent to different business units so they can evaluate how they will be affected by the changes. Each business unit’s head must ensure that they review all the policies, business processes, and regulations to evaluate if and/or how the regulatory changes will require operational changes. Embedding regulatory change technology solutions within a risk and compliance platform that automates action item workflows adds efficiency and reduces guesswork during evaluation.

Mapping regulations to policies and procedures, risks and more

Advanced risk and compliance solutions map regulatory changes directly to the policies and processes affected by them. They can also provide a central repository for any research performed on regulatory changes, such as regulatory change guidance and summary documents, industry association newsletters and links to web sites with information regarding the changes.

Next-generation solutions also harness technologies that determine what artifacts within the organization may be impacted by those changes, such as policy and procedure documents, training classes, risks, controls, assessment checklists, compliance monitoring and testing activities, audits and/or any compliance activities within the organization that is related to regulations.

Each business unit can link the documents and policies they upload to the system related to the specific regulations and risks. This creates a streamlined workflow for regulatory change management. If there is a change in a regulation, the system will automatically highlight all the policies and documents that are linked to that regulation. Thus, there is no need to spend hours on understanding how the business is affected by the regulatory changes; the information will be automatically available.

Enhancing and automating regulatory change accountability

Today’s business process software can easily provide audit trails between users and activities. First it can provide a mechanism to document if the regulatory change is applicable for the organization. Advanced regulatory change management solutions deliver an audit history of when the assessment was performed, by whom and if the change was applicable to the organization. By simply using a system with robust audit trail functionality for regulatory change management, organizations can easily provide evidence of all activities and documentation associated with regulatory updates, including regulatory changes that were evaluated but determined not applicable to the organization.

%%POST-CONTENT-DEMO-BANNER%%

Project managing regulatory change

If applicable to the organization, modern solutions can initiate a regulatory change workflow process to determine the impact and manage a project plan to implement any changes. There are many business project management tools available today that enable organizations to easily create projects and assign tasks, due dates, milestones and more. 360factors Regulatory Change Management application enables customers to easily create and managing a regulatory change project plan along with all associated tasks and activities, including coordinating activities across the entire organization, business units and product lines. Additionally, the application notifies all relevant parties across the organization associated with that regulation of the regulatory update, including important information such as effective dates, due dates, supporting documentation on the change and/or what needs to be done as well any other external documents or information links available.

Get more out of your regulatory change management program

If you are seeking regulatory change management solution that enables your organization to monitor, evaluate impact, map activities and documentation and provide greater regulatory change accountability, we recommend looking at what a dedicated Regulatory Change Management solution like Predict360 can do for you. Want to know more? Get in touch with our regulatory experts for a demonstration.