Ways to Future-Proof Your Company’s Compliance
by Francine Breckenridge, Compliance and Legal Officer, U.S. Money Reserve
Staying ahead of the curve takes work, but if you follow these steps, you can ensure that your company remains compliant, regardless of what the future holds.
In the world of compliance, companies continually strive to stay ahead of the rules, regulations, and upcoming events that impact the way they do business. In some ways, it’s a little bit like trying to put the cart before the horse.
Depending on the work sector, the rules and regulations companies have to adhere to are continually evolving and changing, much like winds during a storm. It is a full-time job to stay ahead of those changes so that your company is always in compliance. There are so many nuances that need to be managed. While it may appear that this constant, regular flow of change is a challenge, in many cases, it provides a real opportunity to grow your business, ensuring that it survives well into the future.
There are, however, a few things you can do today to future-proof your company for tomorrow. Here are four suggestions to keep your company compliant, your workers safe, and your business humming along on all cylinders.
Get Clear on Your Strategy and Vision for Compliance
Ask yourself: Is your compliance strategy a hindrance or an enhancement to your business? Do you and your employees see it as a useful tool that helps the company excel, or does it merely provide red tape?
The answer to these questions can offer useful insights into what you need to do to change or improve your compliance strategy so that it becomes a business tool, not a business blocker. Compliance plays a crucial role in determining a company’s culture — an element that can make or break a business’s future. As my CEO, Angela Roberts, previously wrote, company culture matters for a wide variety of reasons. Most importantly, it helps to keep talented, skilled, and valuable employees engaged at your firm. Without compliance to support that corporate culture, companies risk a significant brain drain that can put them at a disadvantage in the market.
Compliance should take the complex machinations of regulations and rules and put them into simple, direct business language for all employees, regardless of their background, to understand. Part of creating a comprehensive compliance strategy is creating an accessible and clear plan and vision for your company. Compliance programs that have the breadth and maturity of time behind them can also help create cross-functional teams to manage the impact of regulatory changes in real time and offer proactive protection against the whims of the regulatory world.
A clear compliance strategy also makes it easier to determine whether your organization has achieved its stated goals and stay one step ahead of changing regulatory procedures. Having a clear compliance strategy makes it easier to communicate to your customers how you are handling any ethical concerns. It also helps to bolster employees’ morale since they know that the firm is doing its very best to stay on the right side of the law and associated rules.
There are many ways to create a comprehensive and clear compliance strategy, but it’s important that whatever your strategy, you have a laser focus on identifying what is truly important to your business. In organizations that perform well, compliance strategy, business strategy, goals, and vision are closely aligned. They are not separate. A solid, clear compliance plan should bring people together and make workflows more transparent and, in some cases, more straightforward to navigate by defining the integration among the various workflows.
While creating a compliance strategy that meets all of these criteria may seem impossible, it’s a key component of maintaining a successful business. It shouldn’t be treated as a mere “check-the-box-and-move-on” activity. Comprehensive compliance strategies protect a business’s credibility, brand, and future.
Work with Regulators, Not Against Them
While it’s not regularly discussed in compliance circles, one of the most important things to consider when developing your compliance strategy to ensure your company’s security well into the future is to work with external partners and regulators while the laws and regulations are being made. It may be considered a “bad word” out in the world today, but lobbying is an important activity that helps support your business. Supporting lobbying activities is vital in order to future-proof your compliance strategy.
Think of it this way: If you can’t get a seat at the table to help form the rules and regulations that impact your business, you have no control over what the future looks like. By working with regulators and rule makers, your company can both anticipate and inform upcoming decisions that impact your bottom line. Even though lobbying activities are a medium- to long-term investment, they can pay robust dividends down the road.
Invest in the Right Technology
As I wrote before, investing in the right technology for your compliance needs is vital to your company’s long-term health. Investing in the right technology to track and manage your compliance strategy, processes, and needs can save you money and time should you accidentally run awry of a new rule or regulation. It can also help you track and manage processes that need to be closely monitored in order to remain compliant.
But technology has another valuable perk — the right data and support that come from the right technology can help your management staff see opportunities. Take the current pandemic, for example. Health providers are already subject to robust rules and regulations around patients’ rights and privacy. When the pandemic hit and many providers were forced to take their operations online, most were utterly unprepared. How could therapists have secure conversations with patients? When someone had a cold, how could they safely see a doctor without exposing themselves to COVID-19? Many health providers and insurers who heavily invested in the right technological platforms that met the robust HIPAA standards and compliance needs were able to shift services very quickly and meet patients’ needs. In contrast, those who did not seek out proper, compliant technology were left to struggle to implement the technology amid a worldwide pandemic. Those who chose to move forward with the right technology were able to take advantage of the changing landscape to meet customers and patients where and when they needed it most.
The right technology also can make compliance more collaborative and support the needs of a variety of business lines at once. As the workforce around the world has been forced to work remotely because of the pandemic, there are new hurdles that need to be surmounted to support compliance. Technology is the right tool to use to manage this kind of challenge. Technology needs no time off, and it can be used to jointly collaborate in real time or shifted time on processes and documents that are business-critical.
Predict and Adapt to Unknown Risks
It’s nearly impossible to know what it is we don’t know.
While that statement may seem to be a typo, read it again. We cannot know what we don’t already know. Compliance is the act of predicting, responding to, and imagining unknown risks to prevent problems down the road, and it’s a crucial part of future-proofing your business processes. If you invest in the right technology, it can help you see the forest for the trees and show you things you may not see otherwise.
Compliance data is chock full of business intelligence. When used properly, it can provide a forward-looking, anticipatory picture of what could come up as a potential blocker to the company.
The keyword is data. Getting the right data at the right time means employing the right technology for your work. Cross-correlating data can show emerging trends, expose potential pitfalls, and reveal risks that human eyes may have missed. That’s why it’s so vital to employ the right technology at the right time when managing the future-proofing of compliance.
With the right tools in place, you can gain the time and the confidence to deal with complex compliance issues and perhaps even turn those issues into advantages in the market. Data analytics are a critical part of future-proofing compliance and should be a central point of attention for those who want to create a robust compliance program.
Once you’ve identified the risks using the collected, robust data, you can then choose the best path forward for the company to adapt to the change with minimal disruption to the business on the whole. Adapting to change is a whole lot easier when you know what is coming and what possible changes will look like.
Using this process and working through these tips can save tons of cash, time, effort, and hard work. It will also help keep all the company’s cylinders humming as it navigates the changing compliance landscape. As I have said before, the key to future-proofing your compliance plan is to permit it to inform and continually collaborate with the business as a partner, instead of as a blocker. By integrating compliance into the very fiber of the company’s core, you can ensure that compliance has a continuous, strategic, and beneficial impact on the company as we all move toward a new and constantly evolving future.
