We talk to a lot of financial institutions that struggle to manage their regulatory lifecycle. They spend up to 70% of their compliance time trying to monitor, assess, process and operationalize the deluge of regulatory changes continually coming their way. Some say it can take up to 8 weeks to take a change through the lifecycle—the tasks of:
- Reviewing regulations
- Isolating relevant changes and information
- Pinpointing the obligations within new or changed regulations that are relevant to your business
- Determining how the changed obligation will impact your business units
- Operationalizing the obligations by ensuring they filter down to your GRC policies and controls
Taking weeks to process a regulatory change leaves you open to risk that can negatively impact both their business and their clients. Organizations can’t afford such risk, but they don’t see any alternative to pushing the regulatory rock up the proverbial hill and hoping it doesn’t roll back on them.
You don’t have to live this way
Financial organizations need the tools to help efficiently and accurately manage three main phases of the regulatory lifecycle:
Phase one – Taming the tidal wave of regulatory information
In addition to updating rules and issuing new ones, regulators also indicate their upcoming plans and priorities through news, guidance, and speeches. This information is important because it helps ensure you’re prepared for the next audit or regulatory shift in emphasis.
That’s a lot of information for compliance staff to capture, prioritize, share, and analyze. It’s easy to get bogged down with irrelevant information, increasing the risk of missing a regulatory change or update—not okay.
Automated horizon scanning tools solve for this. The good ones continually scan relevant regulators for information, surfacing only information that’s applicable to your business. These tools automatically capture, aggregate, and filter information geared to your specific needs and interests, while automating distribution to the appropriate individuals. This maximizes efficiency and ensures that everyone in the organization knows that they need to know to keep you on the right side of regulators.
Phase two – Automating obligation and regulatory change management
When updated regulations appear, organizations have to ingest them, determine if they’re applicable, identify new or updated obligations within the thousands of words in that regulatory update, identify how the changes impact the business, and ensure those updated obligations filter downstream to their GRC policies and controls.
Final rules add up to tens of thousands of pages every year, so trying to manually manage these processes is arduous, time-consuming, and error prone. But there are no shortcuts. These documents must be closely examined, and traditional methods consume—and yes, waste—enormous amounts of resources.
Fortunately, there is an alternative to traditional inefficiencies. AI now makes it possible to fully automate regulatory change management processes:
- Reviewing every word of a rule update to determine its relevance to your business
- Summarizing the rule
- Providing a side-by-side comparison of old vs. new text
- Identifying your specific obligations within a relevant rule
- Feeding the new obligation to your GRC to ensure it informs your policies and controls
Phase three – Integrating with your GRC
When you integrate your GRC with your change management automation, all the upstream data analysis and enrichment done in in the latter is automatically delivered to the GRC. This ensures that your policies and controls are always updated, and teams organization-wide work with accurate compliance information and insights. Your GRC becomes a continually updated, one stop shop for managing enterprise compliance, providing end-to-end command and control for your regulatory lifecycle.
To learn more about how AscentAI can help you digitally transform your regulatory lifecycle management capabilities, download our eBook. Or, if you have questions on our solutions and capabilities, send us a message.
