The Road to Compliance: Undertaking the Journey through a single lens approach

A compliance officer's journey towards ensuring regulatory compliance is challenging and fraught with obstacles. In today's world of constant change, new and amended regulations are introduced frequently on top of the constant pressure to reduce costs while increasing efficiencies.

The Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) has the responsibility to ensure that standards are upheld, procedures are implemented and the organisation is compliant with applicable laws and regulations.

Addressing these challenges the CCO needs to stay on top of, not only the compliance of regulations, but to have full visibility and oversight of the progress made, ensure the overall effectiveness of communications, adherence to tasks assigned and defined deadlines.
And to cap it all, this comes with new personal liability for the CCO based on the specific regulations and jurisdictions as they apply across different regimes.

In addition, the advent of remote working policies coupled with distributed organisations (including departments or locations) creates additional challenges for the CCO.

Creating one version of the truth that is centralised and offers a 360-degree status view is a key to delivering full and effective cross organisational compliance.

Having a single lens that delivers the ability to drive efficiencies and value across the entire regulatory compliance lifecycle becomes a must for today's busy CCO. This ability to have a centralised working environment providing a single source of truth mitigates the chances of errors and ensures conformity to specified procedures and processes by bringing together the key stages of compliance:

• Assess - Monitoring the Regulatory Horizon for incoming regulations and the associated impact.

• Design - Creating the organisational program structure to enable regulatory compliance

• Build - Maintaining oversight, management and delivery of the Organisational, Technical, Operational and Data Model changes required.

• Transfer - Ensuring the business readiness to adopt and maintain new Operating Model procedures.

• Sustain - Providing ongoing evidence across the 3 lines of defence (Management control, risk and control monitoring and independent audit) to ensure an effective control framework is in place.

This single lens approach delivers the ability for a compliance team to take an existing or new piece of regulation, break it down into actionable steps; assign those tasks to accountable function heads and keep track on progress as an independent control, as well as for reporting to the regulators.