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For financial service companies, reputation is of paramount importance. If public trust in a brand takes a hit, old customers flee and new ones stay clear. Consistent compliance with regulations that govern consumer interactions is therefore critical not only for staying on the right side of the law and avoiding penalties and fines, but also for establishing and maintaining a sterling reputation as an honest, upstanding, law-abiding and consumer-oriented organization.
Compliance, however, is not trivial to achieve -- or to maintain. The regulatory landscape is a complex patchwork of local, national and regional laws, policies and regulations. Financial service providers that operate internationally or across state borders must be aware of them all and ensure that each interaction complies with those that are relevant. Despite best intentions, it’s easy to err.
To enable ongoing compliance monitoring as well as audits, each interaction with each customer or prospect -- via phone, email, chat, social media or any other channel or medium -- must be carefully documented and filed away for easy access. Once recorded, customer interaction data is archived and undergoes a process of reconciliation, management, and enrichment. The data is analyzed and interactions assessed for compliance.
The Only Constant is Change
A quality monitoring process that was once limited to tracking phone conversations has now been broadened to cover touchpoints including websites, email, SMS, Skype/VoIP, chats and instant messaging. Interactions from diverse media must be recorded and archived. In too many organizations, however, as communication channels have been added, channel-specific recording solutions have been added as well. The result is silos of isolated data for each channel. As a result, tracking each customer’s conversational journey across multiple channels is difficult at best, if possible at all.
With multi-channel communications increasingly the norm, consolidated recording and monitoring solutions are essential. To manage compliance, financial service organizations must be able to track, monitor and analyze communications, regardless of how they occur, and follow the customer journey from first contact through to completion. They need flexible, scalable solutions that can efficiently manage the large quantities of diverse data that they are collecting.
Changing communications technologies are not the only reason -- or even the primary reason -- why flexibility is essential for customer interaction management solutions. Most financial service organizations operate across multiple jurisdictions and state, national and international borders. Regulations are constantly being updated and changed, and managing those changes -- ensuring that they are promptly and properly recorded and implemented in the system -- is no trivial task.Each change may impact multiple functions within the organization. Ensuring uninterrupted compliance across locations as requirements change is no simple task.
Automation is the Only Answer
Today, it’s no longer feasible to depend on slow and imprecise manual updating processes when regulations change. Agile businesses need all regulatory systems to be “go” when entering new regions, or when regulations are updated. Likewise, manual quality checks of random interactions no longer suffice since they present only a single slice of what is often a multi-channel interaction . For auditing purposes, journey-level recording, archiving, and monitoring is essential.
Digital transformation initiatives have already revolutionized numerous business processes, reducing operational complexity and costs. Regulatory compliance is now on the cusp of a similar change. A new generation of reg-tech solutions is easing the regulatory compliance burden with flexible, scalable automated solutions for recording, archiving, monitoring and analyzing not just customer interactions, but full conversational journeys.
Sedric transforms monitoring from a burden required by regulatory bodies into a positive agent of change. With all interactions rapidly scanned, compliance officers can quickly and accurately identify and examine those that are problematic, and identify precisely how compliant the company is. Using AI, it enables organizations to leverage their vastf interaction data, extracting actionable information and applying it to enhance the user experience and build brand value, as well as improving compliance.
Discover how Sedric can help your organization streamline QA, improve the customer experience and enhance your brand equity.
“Training and monitoring of consumer-facing employees will be critical to ensure that an organization is compliant. Technology will support and help the credit and collections industry meet demanding obligations with ease and efficiency, in order to produce the outcomes a regulator wants to see.”
Consumer Financial Services Regulatory & Compliance Group
Clark Hill
“Our challenge going forward is to position our industry and our companies as desirable places to work. We must implement diversity, equity and inclusion in our workplaces, and get the word out that we have changed. Ask your newest employees for feedback—what would make our workplace desirable for their friends and acquaintances? In this post-pandemic world, getting people to crawl out of their comfortable cocoons may be difficult, but it can be done!”
CACi
“In the last few years, the buzz of the call centers faded away. Now that many people still have the opportunity to continue to work from home, performance directors need to pivot their focus. We need to ensure that the training is effective in this new environment. The move is from hours in a classroom setting to immediate, personalized micro-learning units that enforce the corrective behaviors.”
Resurgent Capital
“The digital collections movement continues to be in full steam and we are excited to see all of the new technologies that are coming into the ARM industry to help drive enhanced collection performance in a compliant manner. We anticipate additional M&A consolidation globally in the ARM industry, as more digital ARM companies look to accelerate market entry and obtain blue-chip clients and deploy digital-first solutions.”
“Digitization will be critically accelerated in 2023. Recovery organizations may be required to furnish consumers’ account data through consumer-selected platforms that will likely be different from organizations’ traditional payment portals. Organizations should start preparing their technology and operations for that contingency now to harness the trend to their benefit.”
Kredit
“Data is the new oil, and extracting data from all sources, especially voice, will be a must-have in 2023. We are in the age of machine learning, and ML runs on data. Getting ALL the data and getting it into one place for the ML to do what it can are the key differences between organizations that will make it and those that don't.”
Indebted
“In 2023, collectors and creditors will be required to work closer together. Reg F oversight requirements have created a new reality of shared compliance responsibility. Servicers and creditors can better collaborate by using new data-driven compliance platforms that provide all parties with critical insights and generate the transparency and trust needed to succeed in a tightening regulatory climate.”
As Gen Z enters the workforce, you’ll have up to four generations in your agency. Everyone learns differently. Young people learn from TikTok videos, and there is a professional term for this: micro-learning. Such short videos are especially efficient when sent out close to the time when the violation occurred.
Barron & Newburger
The most efficient training systems I’ve seen are those which build surgical, data-driven compliance content and provide agents the exact training they need when they most need it. This approach avoids wasting time and money on training which does not address the need. Continuous, role-based training programs that focus on the needs of each individual agent are some of the most efficient and effective I’ve seen.
Bedard Law Group
“Training is only going to be effective if it's done at or near the time the violation occurred. As agents handle hundreds of calls a week they will not have the capacity to remember particular moments of each consumer interaction. Therefore, effective monitoring will be critical to address the deficiency when it happens, in order to remediate quickly so that it does not become a systemic problem going forward.”
Consumer Financial Services Regulatory & Compliance Group
Clark Hill
