For any company operating or serving customers in several international markets, managing compliance presents a multifaceted challenge. Even in our globalized world, many aspects of compliance are still localized, whether by state, country or region. To effectively manage a compliance team working in multiple jurisdictions, you need a reliable way to communicate and stay on top of the ever-evolving landscape of laws and regulations.
What particular challenges do global compliance teams face and how can they be addressed?
Compliance teams face the daunting task of navigating diverse regulatory frameworks, some of which are specific to particular geographical areas, products, or industries. Managing this complexity is compounded when teams operate in different languages and time zones. Ensuring compliance on a global scale requires a meticulous approach and effective strategies for staying up to date of regulatory changes and coordinating compliance efforts among team members.
These strategies should include using the right technology, excellent communication strategies, effective team training, internal assessments and close collaboration with legal counsel.
Particularly when compliance teams are large and when a company is scaling, technology becomes indispensable; it allows for greater efficiency and better team communication, and it helps protect your company from overlooked risk and human error. Compliance management software offers automated real-time monitoring of regulatory updates. It can provide timely alerts to specific employees and managers and send updates about changes relevant to each jurisdiction, enabling teams to stay informed and proactive. Most platforms also provide built-in communication channels, making it easy for everyone to be aligned, informed and aware of the latest regulatory requirements.
Regular training and education programs are also crucial for keeping compliance teams informed and up-to-date about changing regulations. Compliance managers can improve team performance and reduce risk by providing staff members with resources and support to enhance their understanding of local regulations and what they mean for the company.
Team managers should also perform regular audits and assessments of compliance processes in order to identify and address any gaps or deficiencies. (You don’t want to wait for an external audit to uncover and deal with holes or hiccups in your compliance processes.) Internal audits help ensure that compliance efforts are effective and that any issues are promptly addressed.
Acing Compliance Requires a Multifaceted Approach
Maintaining air-tight compliance on a global scale requires a combination of technology, communication, and ongoing education. By implementing the strategies discussed here, compliance teams can effectively navigate the complexities of regulatory compliance across multiple jurisdictions. The trick is finding the right mix of these for your company.
“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
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