Enable trust and drive value in 2023 – through compliance

Compliance is everyone’s responsibility, from senior leadership to middle managers and front-line workers. However, too often the compliance team is seen as the sole gatekeeper of ethical business. And trust is a significant competitive advantage for companies.

There is a need to embed ethics into the employee mindset and how to make compliance an inherent way of doing business.

Let’s have a look at the key drivers necessary to operationalize compliance into your business:

• Adoption

• Integration

• Engagement

• Insight

• Adaptability

Adoption

Ease of access and usability are paramount considerations in adoption. Compliance processes must be both accessible to an organization’s rank-and-file and be susceptible to regular utilization. While technology can automate and streamline compliance processes in a host of instances (including third party risk management, for example), technologically driven compliance solutions should be carefully evaluated by a company prior to adoption, to ensure that the interface is intuitive, configurable, and scalable.

Integration

Integration of compliance-conscious processes and procedures into the operational fabric of the organization is critical to mitigate the potential for ethical and legal infractions. A virtual prerequisite for integration, however, is complete compliance program transparency. Too often, an organization’s various divisions operate as information silos, where critical compliance-relevant information remains shielded from broader public view. Such territorial practices completely undermine the compliance function’s ability to make informed, data-driven decisions.

Integration also requires that the organization’s compliance risk profile is consolidated into a holistic enterprise-wide risk assessment. This enables the organization to visualize more effectively—and consequently prioritize—the totality of its unique risk factors, thereby ensuring that scarce organizational resources are allocated on a more objective, data-driven basis.

Engagement

Engagement is another critical element of an effective compliance program that focuses on the extent to which an organization’s employees operationalize compliance concerns. To facilitate such engagement, the compliance program should be designed to maximize practical considerations wherever possible. This includes integrating compliance controls into existing business processes in the least obtrusive manner possible. Engagement also requires that the compliance function be dedicated to consistent communication of compliance expectations and solicitation of stakeholder feedback.

Solicitation of feedback is a recognition that compliance is a shared responsibility.

Insight

An effective compliance program is ultimately driven by the power of data. A lack of meaningful insight into the major risk factors facing the organization is a recipe for the execution of a fragmented and incoherent compliance strategy—one that fails to meet regulator expectations and is ineffective in ultimately detecting (and potentially preventing) legal violations. Accordingly, the compliance function of the organization must be dedicated to data collection, aggregation, and analysis whenever and wherever possible to inform decisionmakers about enhancing potentially deficient internal controls or devoting additional resources to mitigating a particular risk.

This insight is only possible, however, where compliance data is routinely collected and easily accessible, making the utilization of an integrated compliance management platform the ideal solution.

Adaptability

Adaptability refers to the ability of the compliance program to expand or adjust over time as additional concerns materialize and new regulatory requirements arise. An adaptable program is one that evolves almost organically in response to new concerns. These programs articulate broad, values-driven principles that are reflected in all operational practices and are capable of being expanded in response to emerging regulatory requirements.

In conclusion: now it is time to start driving ethical change, with the goal to operationalize compliance, enable trust, and drive value. Trust and privacy security will have to be embedded into the core of your business so that you can catch the tailwinds to achieve the 2023 success.

I hope that this focus on compliance being everyone’s responsibility was helpful. Should you need assistance in implementing the suggestions, let me know; I will get you in touch with experts; contact me at [email protected]