What is Regulatory Compliance Management Software?

Today’s compliance managers need powerful and effective Regulatory Compliance management software in a business environment defined by sustained market volatility and ever-increasing regulations. Companies need the ability to integrate enterprise-wide risk management processes and multiple regulations. Firms are witnessing a dramatic increase in active first-line users. Sometimes tens of thousands—are scattered across the organization while using tools with inconsistent capabilities. These users require solutions that integrate the power of artificial intelligence (AI) with an enhanced user experience. These tools must be flexible in adapting to regulatory change, yet simple enough to use and deploy to large numbers of users without extensive training.

What is Regulatory Compliance Management?

Regulatory Compliance Management Definition

To put it simply, regulatory compliance management provides guidelines, policies, and activities to follow regulations and prove compliance with relevant laws and statutes.

Some examples of regulatory compliance regulations include the Dodd-Frank Act, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Challenges with Regulatory Compliance Management:

Cost

First off, compliance is costly and the dollar amount can be a hard pill for organizations to swallow. Studies show the average cost of compliance is $5.47 million. However, poor alignment with regulatory processes increases risk and reduces profitability. The cost of non-compliance is an average of $14.82 million. That means it is 2.71 times more costly for an organization to not comply with mandates.

Standardization

Inability to standardize on an organizational process to manage increasing complexity while retaining flexibility and ensuring compliance.

Failed Audits Due to Lack of Process Compliance

Regulators have increasingly been cracking down on how organizations govern models and manage model risk. When companies fail an audit it is usually due to these five reasons:

1. Lack of Leadership

In order for an organization to remain compliant, it is essential for the CEO and other board members to make it clear that compliance is a priority for their organization. 

2. Compliance is not aligned with organizational goals

Organizations need their Governance Risk and Compliance goals to be closely aligned with their business goals. Furthermore, compliance is supposed to support business goals and it can play a large role in pass or fail come audit time. 

3. No accountability

Business functions regardless of type, need to have defined owners. Individuals who will drive initiatives forward take responsibility for ensuring success and be held accountable when things go wrong and or fail. That is especially true for compliance and GRC functions. Hence, the reason all managers of the compliance function must be held accountable regardless of what level. If not, you will be sending the message that compliance is not considered to be serious. 

4. A Check the boxes mentality

Naturally, the nature of compliance has changed over the past few decades. Previously, it was viewed as a necessary but tedious task, something to get done but not to lose much sleep about. Now, just doing the bare minimum is not enough. As a result, companies whose compliance management processes aren’t engaged and proactive fail audits.  

5. Using an old-fashioned approach

Such a view of compliance might mean that analog GRC tools are used to manage compliance requirements – Microsoft Excel is great for some tasks but not for regulatory compliance management. Moreover, this viewpoint also refers to the outdated concept of compliance requirements having fixed beginning and endpoints. 

Increasing Complexity

Last but not least, the ever-increasing complexity of managing large, complex, distributed efforts requires adaptation of modern practices and principles to compete in the “new” economy

IBM OpenPages Regulatory Compliance Management Software

Manage Risk, Regulatory Challenges, and Regulatory Change With Ease

IBM OpenPages regulatory compliance management software is a modern, scalable, and flexible solution that combines software, process automation, data feeds, and expertise. Therefore, It enables institutions to have a more complete, accurate, and timely view of their regulatory compliance risks. Supported by a centralized data model, the solution leverages a configurable workflow and AI capabilities to provide an end-to-end view of compliance and risk.

IBM OpenPages regulatory compliance management software transforms the compliance process. Furthermore, by subscribing to the optional Promontory obligation libraries by compliance topic, obligations stay up to date with consistent quality, granularity, and approach.

Using AI capabilities from IBM Watson®, the OpenPages platform consolidates different GRC systems and centralizes siloed risk management functions in one integrated solution. Thus, it helps reduce the cost of maintaining multiple solutions.

IBM OpenPages Helps

Consolidate Regulatory Requirements in a Central Repository.

A single repository can separate and classify complex regulations and allow other individuals across the enterprise to process large volumes of regulatory data faster and more efficiently.

Map Regulatory Requirements to Internal Taxonomies and Business Structures.

The tool provides the ability to map regulatory requirements to internal GRC data— connecting regulatory data to key risks, controls, and policies, and linking that data to an overall business strategy. Complex regulations are organized, visible and measurable in firm-specific terminology.

Distribute Regulatory Data to Relevant Stakeholders and Owners.

Organize regulatory requirements into logical groupings and assign them to owners across the organization.

Ingest Feeds from Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence Connector.

Directly ingest regulatory event feeds from Thomson Reuters into IBM OpenPages Regulatory Compliance Management. Auto-generate workflows assigned to users based on supplied data points, as well as documents impacted by regulatory change. Plus, users can also ingest regulatory library feeds from Thomson Reuters to view up-to-date regulatory text.

Load Regulatory Feeds from Wolters Kluwer into IBM OpenPages Regulatory Compliance Management Software.

Wolters Kluwer data feed integration. Rules-based setup automatically processes incoming regulatory data. Additionally, IBM OpenPages Regulatory Compliance Management checks for any Wolters Kluwer taxonomy changes and updates the relevant taxonomy fields.

Load Regulatory Feeds from Ascent RegTech into IBM OpenPages Regulatory Compliance Management.

Ingest regulatory documents parsed by Ascent into a three-tiered structure, including granular-level tasks requiring compliance from financial institutions.

Manage Regulatory Interactions.

Out-of-box workflows help users document and manage an organized response to regulator interactions, such as inquiries, meeting requests, and examinations.

Load Regulatory Feeds from Reg-Track into IBM OpenPages Regulatory Compliance Management Software.

Seamless ingestion of Reg-Track’s standardized feed of Expert High-Level Analysis together with associated structured data to streamline the horizon scanning, applicability, and impact analysis work clients undertake.

Why IBM OpenPages

In short, IBM OpenPages regulatory compliance management software assists in reducing the time and costs associated with understanding regulatory compliance requirements and their related controls. This solution:

• Provides the ability to integrate all data, facilitate mapping, and perform concept searches across platforms.
• Enables a transparent, actionable regulatory compliance management process.
• Allows understanding and management of changes to regulations, and management of interactions with regulators.
• regulatory requirements are organizable, transparent, measurable, and actionable.
• Improves efficiency by eliminating duplicative or overlapping controls.