Automate and Integrate: The “Must-Haves” of Enterprise Grade Compliance

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  • 1,374 agencies regulate financial institutions globally
  • $4.3 billion in U.S. regulator fines levied in 2024; $1.06 billion of that levied against U.S. headquartered institutions

Increasing numbers of regulatory bodies produce a never-ending deluge of new and updated information. You have to review all of it just to determine if any of it impacts your organization. Manually keeping abreast of constant regulatory change is both labor-intensive and error-prone, and the cost of non-compliance can be extraordinary, both financially and reputationally. 

In short, failure to accurately manage and update your regulatory obligations and all the systems and processes that rely on them threatens your business. You may accurately record a changed obligation under regulatory update, but how does that update migrate to your corporate policies and controls? Is that a manual process? Are your compliance automation tools and your GRC separate islands? Is sharing information between them akin to a high-stakes game of ‘telephone,” hoping information makes it from one to the other intact? 

Then there’s the inescapable matter of time. If manual management of a regulatory change takes weeks, you’ve opened a weeks-long window to risk. In addition, if you miss an obligation or a change at the beginning of the process—and you sometimes will—errors compound as they move through the compliance chain to your policies and controls. This can negatively impact business decision-making and make it impossible to get an accurate, holistic view of your compliance environment. Lack of synchronization between systems that identify regulatory obligations and those that put them to use creates a segmented governance landscape, and a lack of centralized command and control. 

Automation to the Rescue

Automation and integration are key to managing both upstream compliance (staying up to date on relevant regulatory developments) and downstream compliance (the day-to-day operations reliant on the obligations, policies, and controls that govern business functions). AI trained exclusively on regulator-generated content and your internal data can efficiently keep up with ever-changing regulations, while doing so manually requires throwing more and more bodies at the problem, multiplying both costs and the potential for error. Automated tools can also scale infinitely at no additional cost to accommodate new regulators should you, for instance, enter new lines of business. 

AscentAI automates the full regulatory lifecycle. AscentHorizon keeps you in the loop on regulatory evolution like news, enforcement actions, and guidance, while AscentFocus fully automates regulatory change management processes right through to seamless integration with your GRC.

Greater efficiency in a fraction of the time

The ideal model for enterprise-grade compliance for organizations of any size includes an AI-enabled tech stack with automated regulatory change management tied directly to your GRC. This combination automates and integrates the upstream chaos of the ever-shifting regulatory landscape, along with the downstream policies and controls they inform. 

This synergy of upstream and downstream tech produces better outcomes than the two acting independently. Together, they automatically identify regulatory changes relevant to your business, filter out non-relevant information, automatically identify your specific obligations under a new or changed rule, and automatically feed the new obligations to your GRC tool. 

These capabilities not only keep your organization abreast of relevant regulatory developments, they also keep your GRC up to date and equip teams to respond to changes more quickly and effectively. The benefits of automating and integrating both upstream and downstream compliance functions are myriad:

  • Monitor, capture, analyze, and operationalize regulatory data more quickly and effectively
  • Take full command and control of the regulatory lifecycle, from publication of a regulatory update right through to the GRC—the compliance control point of your day-to-day business operations
  • Increase efficiency through automating manual tasks 
  • Save by shifting expensive human resources to higher value tasks  
  • Increase accuracy and confidence with full visibility into the compliance lifecycle

Learn more from AscentAI about automating the full regulatory lifecycle—from identifying applicable rules and guidance, to updating obligations in your GRC policies and controls.  

 

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