The volume of regulatory documents driving compliance is an ever-increasing burden. But RegTech solutions can help.
Key takeaways
- Centralise and streamline policy ownership. Maintain a single source of truth for all policies, with clear ownership assigned to named individuals who ensure regular review and updates. This prevents version confusion and ensures accountability.
- Make policies accessible and digestible. Policies should be written in clear, concise language and tailored to different audiences where needed. Organising them in a searchable, centralised library boosts usability and compliance.
- Automate enforcement and tracking for compliance. Use RegTech solutions to automate workflows, reminders, and attestation. Digital policy management helps track who has read and acknowledged each policy, create audit-ready trails, and save time across the organisation.
Why are corporate policies important?
Corporate policies are the backbone of any successful business. They guide conduct and behaviour and set out the types of behaviour a firm expects of its employees.
They are the mechanism for translating external regulatory requirements into the DNA of a firm - compliance is ensured when employees understand and operate within the policy boundaries.
Compliance Managers in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, food and manufacturing, life sciences, energy and financial services are used to grappling with swathes of regulation. There are estimates that in the financial sector alone, there were as many as 300 million pages of financial regulatory documents estimated to be in circulation by the end of 2020.
So, what may sound simple, is in practice, a significant challenge. Hundreds of separate policies must be correctly applied to different parts of each business, and just keeping track of who needs to comply with what can be a burden.
How do you create and implement corporate policies?
Ensuring compliance with external regulations begins with the setting of internal policies - outlining everything from data protection obligations through to HR policies on annual leave.
These corporate policies form the guide rails for the business and are an important foundation in establishing a culture of trust and integrity within the business.
Senior executives are held accountable for staff compliance with these policies - and checking this is likely to be the first port of call for any regulatory investigation.
Making sure staff are aware of these policies, that they understand them and being able to validate that understanding is key to good corporate governance and regulatory compliance.
Indeed, some regulators, including the FCA, explicitly make Senior Managers accountable through the Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SMCR). It includes two conduct rules that require Senior Managers to take reasonable steps to ensure their businesses are controlled effectively and that each firm is compliant with the requirements of the regulatory system. Both of these rules are relevant to corporate policies.
How do you manage corporate policies?
Keeping on top of regulation and making sure that policies reflect the latest changes can be easier said than done. Agreeing and then articulating each corporate policy is a time-consuming process that needs business-wide input to master.
A strategic approach is needed spanning problem emergence, agenda-setting, consideration and then the selection of policy options.
Once drafted and approved, corporate policies need to be accessible and easy to understand. Then once read, employee attestations must be sought to confirm business-wide understanding. The final step is regular monitoring to ensure your company and your people are in check.
Where does corporate policy management go wrong?
Most companies use word-processing tools to write and amend their corporate policies. Then drafts are exchanged over email, with all the version control and tracking issues that entails. Then once signed-off, policies are emailed to employees. Finally, employees attest that they have read and understood each policy – again by email.
This approach is inefficient, fragmented and most importantly, makes it very difficult to track who has attested to what and may prompt regulators to ask some serious questions about compliance processes.
How can RegTech help manage polices?
Luckily, there are RegTech solutions that can help address these challenges. Policy management platforms are a proven and cost-effective means of creating, socialising and driving attestation for up-to-date corporate policies and demonstrating constant compliance with moving regulation.
A centralised platform can enable corporate policy owners to organise their policies, documents and handbooks in a single location. Workflow processes can be streamlined through real-time collaboration, while review times are significantly reduced from policy conception to implementation.
RegTech systems can automatically notify corporate policy owners when their policies need to be updated and reviewed, while changes can be instantly cascaded to respective teams and employees. They can limit who accesses which documents, meaning that the right employees engage with the right subject matter. And they can even control the format and language too.
Perhaps most importantly, employee completion can be analysed according to geography, department and level. That helps you target your resources to where they are needed most, boosting compliance levels and ultimately saving you time and money.
Looking for more compliance insights?
Our Policy Hub allows you to create, update, approve, communicate and seek attestation for your corporate policies. This tools also helps you easily show compliance with rules and regulations. Key features include:
- dynamic assignment of relevant affirmation requests
- assignment of administration to specific departments
- access to dashboard reports
- creation of granular analytics to view staff completions across global, departmental and individual levels
Apart from our Policy Hub tool, theCompliance Portalalso features ourLearning Management System (LMS),Compliance Register,Compliance Surveys,Compliance Declarationsand ourAI Digital Assistant (Aida).
If you would like to access leading insights and compliance tips, you can browse our free resources by topic to find guides, modules, compliance bites and more.
Explore our collectionWritten by: Vivek Dodd
Vivek Dodd MS, CFA is a Director of Skillcast. He has helped hundreds of companies to meet their mandatory compliance training requirement using e-learning courses and tools. His special interest is instructional design and the use of asynchronous learner interactions to effect behavioural change. He is a speaker on compliance training conferences, writes articles on compliance training and e-learning in various journals.
