Here Are The Most Common Challenges in The Regulatory Change Management

Due to the ever-changing nature and complexity of laws and regulations, it is difficult to have a regulatory change management process that is airtight. However, letting items slip through the cracks may expose the organization to more risks. To help you assess what is hindering better management of regulatory change for your team, we’ve gathered some real-world examples below that you can use to start that conversation.

By resolving key issues that affect your team’s ability to process regulatory change faster, you can achieve more agility in adapting to a changing regulatory environment.

Singling Out the Challenges

Misalignment within organizational operations is not uncommon.

There are times when the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, and it is critical to first assess the challenges that are specific to your risk and compliance teams. Whether it is not enough staff or leaky workflows, hearing out your internal teams can help prioritize which processes to tackle first.

Here is a list of the most common challenges in the regulatory change management processes that we hear on a daily basis:

• Delays in receiving cross-regional updates.
• No ability to identify relevant information quickly enough.
• Having to consult multiple sources to discern relevant regulatory changes.
• Overabundance of information: Needing concise yet comprehensive coverage (federal and state).
• Inconsistent updates in multinational operations.
• Inability to map controls and processes internally within different lines of business: products, business units, geographies, and taxonomies within legal entities.
• Extremely manual and inefficient process: multiple spreadsheets, reporting in word, mapping requirements and controls manually.
• Ineffective risk-rating formulas.
• Difficulty finding the right balance between business expansion and regulatory compliance (innovation vs protection).
• It takes a long time to execute requirements because of the volume of information within the legal process.
• There is often not enough staff to have improved coverage for regulatory analysis and expansion.
• Staffing is at capacity and nothing can be sacrificed or removed from the workload.

See if any of these common issues resonate with your team today and start solving for them.

Solving for Too Much Information

The current regulatory environment is a quagmire of information overload, leaving compliance professionals grappling with unrelenting updates from multiple channels.

There is simply too much information dispensed at an ever-increasing speed for compliance professionals to keep up. With alerts from publicly available sources (authorities, agencies, databases) as well as third-party resources, all of that information has to be sieved through to extract applicable requirements and weaved into the existing processes to ensure proper policies are in place.

Whenever you think you’ve dealt with it and can move on to the next item, new amendments come in, sucking you into the updating vortex again. And if you are developing global strategies, this increases the number of jurisdictions to contend with, stretching compliance teams thin in order to work through this information effectively and in a timely fashion. Not to forget that legal information can often be long-winded and full of legal jargon, making the job even more taxing.

What you want is to have the right regulatory intelligence solution in place for the surveillance of the regulatory landscape in jurisdictions where you operate while leaving the interpretation of insights and strategy development to human analysis. Embracing purpose-built technology is a critical step towards optimization and providing efficiencies of scale for your regulatory compliance team.

Today’s regulatory market offers software-as-a-service solutions with a wide variety of features and capabilities that can help not only automate regulatory horizon scanning but also address your team’s unique challenges. It just takes some scoping from different providers to find what works best for your organization.

How to Choose the Right Solution

When choosing the right solution for your team, make sure to get details around functionalities and features that will allow you to reduce the noise from regulatory updates and improve process efficiency so that your regulatory compliance is as far-reaching as possible. Ask deeper questions like:

“Can I set up regulatory change alerts only for the requirements that are applicable to my organization?”

“Can I make sure that my different teams only receive the alerts that are relevant for their business unit?”

“Does your solution offer content that automatically updates with changes?”

“Do I have the ability to organize and filter by topics, business segments, and jurisdictions?”

“Can I check if my current regulatory requirements are complete or if there are gaps?”

“Can I assign and modify statuses for my risks, controls, and tasks?”

“Is it possible to support multiple teams and topics so that different departments can use the solution in different ways?”

“Which third-party software solutions do you integrate with?”

You want the type of a regulatory intelligence solution that will help automate resource-consuming processes and always have the most up-to-date legislative content so that you can have your team focused on high-value priorities. This way, when having to present your cost-benefit analysis, you should be able to say things like:

• We swapped multi-versioned spreadsheets for having one source of truth to mitigate errors.
• We can see in a few clicks what risks any business unit is subject to.
• What took us 30 days to review can now be done in 15 minutes.
• We can automatically update and maintain our targeted legal inventory.
• Our staff can quickly identify relevant legal and regulatory content for our organizational needs.
• Different team members can see what risks are relevant to them specifically.
• We minimized redundancy and streamlined processes across the board.
• We can now cover more legal ground if the organization decides to expand into new jurisdictions or launch new products.

These are just some of the benefits of having the right regulatory change and compliance management technology in place.

If you would like to learn more about what a purpose-built solution can offer your team, reach out to us here and we will talk you through it!

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