Being a compliance officer is not for the faint of heart.
In a nutshell their job is to ensure their company complies with outside regulatory and legal requirements as well as internal policies and bylaws.
Sounds simple enough but consider this: the median number of regulations per industry in the US is 1,130 and it goes as high as 45,000 regulations for the energy sector. In Europe being a compliance officer at a bank is no walk in the park either. It is estimated that European banks must deal with 185 regulatory changes a day on average, up from only 10 in 2004.
Yikes!
And what if a company fails to be compliant? What can happen?
In some cases it can be devastating to the business.
Take for example the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) which outlines regulations pertaining to electronic healthcare data. If the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights finds a company has violated HIPAA regulations, it can lead to a fine which can range from minor to major. If the non-compliance is found to be criminal, the outcome can be an even higher fine and possibly jail time.
Source: Forbes
Balancing risk and efficiency
Not being compliant can put an entire organization at risk. The responsibility for avoiding that risk lies squarely on the shoulders of the compliance officer. With that in mind, is it any wonder compliance officers are sticklers when it comes to making sure their organization is compliant in everything that it does?
But at the same time they don’t want to slow down the business either.
Compliance officers want their company to be able to quickly create and deliver customer-facing documents that are regulatory compliant—through any channel—and to bring new products to market, faster. Wanting to accomplish this and being able to do so are two different things. It may seem impossible but it’s not.
A CCM platform allows Compliance Officers to rest easy
Modern customer communications management (CCM) platforms have been a godsend for compliance officers everywhere – allowing organizations to integrate compliance into business processes seamlessly.
Whether the platform is being used to produce welcome kits, contracts, statements, correspondence or anything else, templates can be pre-built. Within each of these templates assembly rules can be added. With these rules in place, the template will automatically source elements and content that the creator of the piece may not be aware of – things such as jurisdictional, branding, product, language, regulatory and compliance content.
CCM technology saves further time and worry by also making it possible to assign responsibility for document approvals to the people best suited to edit and/or review the content – people such as subject matter experts, lawyers and compliance officers. Each person involved in the content creation process can review the changes in a browser and validate on the spot. In other words, the ability to quickly approve or refuse updates across multiple business units allows organizations to be nimble, regardless of whether they need to respond to prospects or roll out new products.
Source: https://deloitte.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2018/07/06/digital-transformation-bringing-the-risk-and-compliance-function-to-the-table-2/
Two more reasons a CCM makes it easier to sleep at night
Another area of compliance that compliance officers are responsible for is ensuring that all of their electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities. For example, fonts must not be too small or text must be placed a certain way. A modern CCM platform allows a compliance officer to review pieces before they are published. It provides a full view of an entire communications package, in every form in which the material is going to appear, whether paper, web pages, mobile applications, etc. Plus, it presents each document the way it will look across all devices.
If a company fails to be compliant in some way, most oversight entities aren’t looking to throw the book at them right away. Their first priority is usually to help the organization become compliant. In order to do so, the entity must be able to trace back to discover what went wrong. A modern CCM platform makes this a painless process because it allows users to share, route, approve and track documents with a full audit trail. Every step is available for the entity to review and assist the organization in discovering where they need to tweak their process to ensure compliance is met next time.
Learn more about how a modern CCM platform can enable compliance officers and all stakeholders to participate in the communications creation process and meet regulatory and speed-to-market requirements at the same time. Review the white paper “Navigating the New Regulatory Landscape: Integrating Compliance into Your Omni-channel Strategy.
