Driving ROI: Maximizing Returns from Your Regulatory Intelligence Platform
Advantages of using a regulatory change management platform, uncovering how it drives ROI for compliance professionals and their organizations.
The cost of managing compliance is a significant burden for organizations due to an ever-increasing number of requirements year-on-year and the hours associated with managing them – whether it be in-house or outsourced. In the ever-evolving regulatory landscape, compliance professionals face a complex challenge: keeping pace with incessant regulatory changes while also being cost-effective. To tackle these challenges and improve compliance management, organizations are turning to regulatory intelligence platforms as a strategic investment.
The process of managing compliance involves several crucial steps, each of which can benefit from the adoption of AI-driven solutions:
- Exploration and horizon scanning
- Impact assessment
- Response to regulatory change and execution
- Internal and external audits
From researching regulatory updates to the execution of revised compliance measures and the subsequent audit processes, a regulatory intelligence platform offers substantial advantages in cost savings, efficiency, and accuracy. The platform automates regulatory content gathering, qualifies what applies to your organization, streamlines assessments, optimizes execution, and simplifies audit preparations. It represents a strategic investment that will yield impressive ROI, both long- and short-term.
Exploration and Horizon Scanning: Harness Regulatory Change
Compliance isn’t just checking a proverbial box on a to-do list. Regulations continue to shift, and where certain regulatory requirements did not apply to the business before, they may be applicable now – or in the near future. Then, it is the task of the compliance team to look for those applicable updates in a sea of regulatory updates.
To anticipate regulatory change, there is horizon scanning which is identifying and understanding the impact of proposed and upcoming regulatory changes (new legislation, regulations, and guidance). This is meant for the compliance function to stay ahead of the potential risks. And while both processes are critical to the organization, a whopping 82% of compliance professionals still use spreadsheets to manage regulatory change and horizon scanning, according to our 2023 Regology State of Compliance Survey.
With the ever-increasing volume of regulatory updates, relying on spreadsheets is proving highly ineffective, considering countless hours of manual work, data entry, file updates, and other administrative activities, detracting from higher-value priorities.
A regulatory intelligence platform helps eliminate 95% of regulatory update noise. It provides automated monitoring and aggregation of regulatory information, bringing manual searches for updates to a minimum. By streamlining this process, organizations can save significant time and effort, enabling compliance professionals to focus more on revenue-protecting initiatives to stave off non-compliance costs.The platform automates labor-intensive and time-consuming processes, such as:
- Tracking all laws, regulations, and guidance in the relevant jurisdictions organization-wide;
- Automatic change tracking as agency alerts come in;
- Determining what’s applicable to the organization;
- Disseminating updates among team members.
By leveraging a regulatory intelligence platform, compliance teams can redirect more of their efforts toward strategic initiatives that contribute to the overall success and effectiveness of their compliance programs to mitigate hefty fines and costly litigations.
Impact Assessment: Become Swift and Strategic
Once applicable regulatory changes are identified, compliance professionals must assess their impact on the organization's operations. Interpreting regulatory changes accurately and comprehensively can be a complex task, and compliance teams often spend considerable time manually researching and analyzing potential risks and implications of regulatory updates on the business. Since the volume of change increases drastically every year, impact assessment takes longer, costing the organization more billable hours and negatively affecting the reliability of the compliance program.
A regulatory intelligence platform offers unprecedented automation of regulatory change management, including sophisticated analytics and reporting capabilities that enable a quick yet accurate impact assessment. Users also get visibility into the latest penal actions and restitution amounts for a more data-informed risk analysis.With the platform, users accomplish in a few hours or days what took months to a year to complete. This way, organizations can efficiently analyze the potential effects of regulatory changes and allocate resources accordingly, ensuring a cost-effective response.
Response to Regulatory Change: Execute with Precision
After assessing the impact, compliance teams must make appropriate adjustments to their compliance program in response to regulatory changes to ensure compliance with newly introduced or revised regulations. They must update policies, procedures, stakeholder communication, training materials, and controls to align with new requirements. Without streamlined processes, executing compliance measures can be time-consuming and inefficient. Manual methods and disjointed workflows can lead to duplication of efforts, errors, and increased costs.
Centralization plays a key role in the fast-acting enhancement of compliance efforts. A regulatory intelligence platform acts as one source of truth, as opposed to outdated and error-prone spreadsheets, disparate agency sources, and siloed workflows. It is a dynamic repository for applicable regulations, guidelines, and related authoritative documents, making items easily accessible to your compliance teams and reducing the likelihood of overlooking critical updates. This streamlined execution process not only improves efficiency but also reduces the likelihood of errors and costly inconsistencies.
Finally, the platform helps demonstrate that the organization is staying ahead of regulatory changes by showing bill progression and enabling proactive adjustments to policies, procedures, and practices. Being able to promptly respond to regulatory changes, organizations demonstrate to auditors their commitment to compliance, and that they are making efforts to reduce the risk of compliance breaches and hefty fines.
Auditing: Showcase Compliance Excellence
The final step in managing compliance involves internal and external audits to evaluate and stress-test the quality of the compliance program. Whether you are bringing in a third-party legal counsel, independent auditors, or examining the compliance program from within, a regulatory intelligence platform can prove invaluable to your audit readiness. It provides comprehensive audit trails, organized documentation, and efficient reporting functionalities to be able to demonstrate an enterprise-wide regulatory purview and information flow. The platform offers robust features that:
- Clearly showcase compliance efforts,
- Fast-track the audit process,
- Reduce the time and effort required for reviews,
- Get minimal operational disruption, and
- Bring down audit costs as a result.
Conclusion: The Bottom Line Impact
Depending on your organization’s performance goals, process optimization will always yield ROI in the long run. Whether it’s entering a new market or launching a new product line, fast access to the needed information and optimal allocation of resources and time will positively reflect on the bottom line. A regulatory intelligence platform can scale alongside organizational growth, accommodating increased compliance requirements and expanding regulatory landscapes. It is a flexible platform that can handle larger volumes of data, user accounts, and regulatory complexities, while your team’s headcount can stay the same.
To learn more about how a regulatory intelligence platform can help your organization - or see it in action - click here to visit our regulatory change management page.
You may also be interested in:
Regology’s 2023 State of Regulatory Compliance Survey Takeaways
Achieving Proactive Regulatory Compliance and What to Overcome
