What’s RegTech?

RegTech, or Regulatory Technology, is the application of cutting-edge emerging technology to help manage regulatory processes.
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It is no mystery why many companies struggle to implement new rule changes. Rule changes have skyrocketed by an eye-watering 500% in the last decade. In a world where a new regulatory alert is issued every seven minutes, many companies need help keeping up with the pace of change
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Managing risk and compliance and conducting regulatory audits and supervisory reviews requires excellent attention to detail and can be incredibly time-consuming when done manually. And yet, that's exactly what many businesses are trying to do. A 2017 study found that only 69% of Chief Compliance Officers (CCO) say their organization leverages technology to help with compliance initiatives. Moreover, less than half of organizations use data analytics and other advanced technology processes to manage compliance.
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Navigating the world of regulatory compliance can be complex, but one thing is for sure: the pace of new rules will slow down soon. The rate might accelerate further if recent trends are anything to go by.
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However, this doesn't mean companies should despair and resign themselves to being one step behind. RegTech provides the answer.
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RegTech, or Regulatory Technology, applies cutting-edge emerging technology to help manage regulatory processes. RegTech solutions solve regulatory challenges by streamlining monitoring, reporting, and compliance activities. These solutions leverage powerful tools and robust content libraries to manage tasks, policies and procedures, evidence, and internal, external, or supervisory audits.

The Pain Points of Managing Regulatory Compliance Manually

Let's look at the critical tasks associated with regulatory compliance and why they are challenging to manage without RegTech solutions.

Keeping up to date with regulation - As we've discussed, regulation changes rapidly, and keeping up to date is paramount. Without technology, businesses rely on individuals to continually research upcoming changes, notify the relevant teams, and update the policies and procedures.
Identifying new requirements - To successfully implement a recent rule change, you need a thorough understanding of how it will impact your business. This step involves several actions, including research on meeting compliance and presenting evidence of compliance.
Maintaining compliance and assigning tasks - Compliance requires that companies continually review and maintain their processes and procedures and identify gaps in compliance. A large company could have over 1000 or even more controls and related tasks to keep track of. Spreadsheets and emails do not match the problem's scale, and critical actions are often missed.
Evidence for audits - Compliance activities must be assigned, tracked, and evidenced for audits. This information must follow a logical workflow and be readily retrievable when needed.

The Benefits of RegTech

Increasing productivity and efficiency

Regtech solutions allow companies to increase productivity by leveraging intelligent workflows and simple user interfaces to view every project comprehensively.

Analytics

Analytics reports help companies stay ahead of the competition by giving them a head start on solving problems or finding new opportunities.

Greater accuracy

Manual process handling is vulnerable to human error. Despite employees' best efforts, mistakes happen. The sheer amount of work involved in managing compliance today has exacerbated this problem, requiring employees to work harder and faster while maintaining high accuracy. RegTech solutions can solve this problem in many ways. For example, the software can link policies and procedures to the rules library and trigger notifications when a task requires action.

A comprehensive overview

Managing compliance manually usually involves several independent spreadsheets. It is needlessly convoluted and messy and opens the door for critical activities to be missed. When all risk and compliance activities are in one place, companies remain in control.

Streamlining work processes

Conducting compliance tasks manually is time-consuming, and a large part of this lost time comes from identifying the next steps. An automated RegTech solution eliminates this lost time—employees know which tasks to complete, boosting efficiency.

Greater transparency

Companies with siloed teams and processes struggle to manage compliance activities. However, with RegTech technology tools, transparency is increased across organizations. This promotes collaboration and ensures the company can obtain more valuable insights into its data analysis activities.

What's Next?

It's time to move regulation management beyond spreadsheets and into RegTech workflow solutions that work. A comprehensive GRC solution like BCube Analytics RegStacker empowers companies to collaborate with auditors, maintain compliance, and improve procedures in one user-friendly space. The future of managing compliance is RegTech.