A significant part of any financial industry involves compliance across several different disciplines. Whether it’s maintaining established governmental compliance standards or understanding and adapting to new rules/regulations, companies need to be able to understand and adapt to regulatory changes. And every industry is different, of course. Regulations change all the time. So how can a successful business get ahead of some of these regulatory changes without disrupting its entire operation? By using a regulatory change management system. In this article, we’ll dive into what it is and some of the ways it can help you enforce compliance and adapt to changing standards at your organization.
What Is Regulatory Change Management?
A regulatory change management system (otherwise known as an RCMS) is a system that helps organizations understand the impact of changes to regulations. It also aids in creating compliance, setting up monitoring/auditing, helping with risk management strategies, and ultimately reducing costs. The entire point of regulatory change management is to ensure businesses can withstand the impact of certain economic risks while simultaneously helping to keep consumers safe. An RCMS can be used for impact analysis of regulations and legislation on your business, to help cultivate an understanding of what regulations apply to your industry and how to manage them appropriately. They can also indicate which systems can be affected by any regulatory changes. That way, you’ll know what needs to be updated and when to do it. These systems also help you when regulations change. By providing an easy way to track updates made within a company’s systems over time, it’s easier to ensure everything stays up-to-date with the latest standards set forth by regulators and the government itself.
Why You Need One
A regulatory change management system helps you document, monitor, and manage changes to your systems and processes throughout the company. The goal of such systems is to ensure every change gets documented, tested, implemented, and audited. This helps with risk, compliance, monitoring, and auditing—all vital parts of staying on top of your company’s compliance in all areas. Here are just a handful of the many unique actions a powerful, AI-based regulatory change management software can do:
- Monitoring
- Auditing
- Cost Reduction
- Impact analysis
- Increase compliance throughout an organization
- Risk mitigation and attenuation
- Improved visibility
- Better communication
- More efficiency
Setting up a powerful system is one of the best methods for ensuring compliance where it matters most.
Cost Reduction
Part of running any company successfully involved watching—and eventually finding ways to reduce—costs. Plenty of things lead to cost issues related to compliance. Poor training, for example, can lead to significantly less compliance on the part of employees, which in turn costs the company money. Poor record-keeping, out-of-date systems, and other pain points can ultimately contribute negatively to the costs of remaining compliant at any organization. At that point, the company needs to deploy a regulatory change management system to help keep its costs down. Regulatory change management systems can help you reduce costs by automating processes, reducing the need for manual intervention, creating fewer instances where manual testing is required, and effectively reducing the need for manual training and reporting throughout the organization.
Reporting and Auditing
One of the main benefits of implementing a regulatory change management system is that it can help you with risk and compliance. Auditing—despite being a retaliatory ominous word—is a fantastic example of how a system can help your organization stay on top of things. It works even better if it’s AI-assisted. AI is not a replacement for the human touch. Instead, it’s a powerful tool for getting the job done better. Auditing should happen often. With an effective audit framework in place at your company, you can make ensure your business has all the necessary documentation in place to remain compliant with various regulations, including (but not limited to) such as ISO 9001, ISO 13485, GDPR, HIPAA, FCC, and various FDA regulations (it ultimately depends on your industry). Audit processes are ideal for identifying problems and discrepancies. They’re also quite useful for providing recommendations and insight into responding to possible issues that pop up from time to time. When you need actionable insights into areas and desire continuous improvement, it’s essential to have a robust auditing system in place.
The Bottom Line
A regulatory change management system can be an exceptional, useful tool for your business. By helping you stay on top of the latest changes in regulations, it’ll help reduce costs and improve risk management. It can also analyze the impact of proposed system changes and help you avoid costly errors in implementation/operation. When you want to improve overall efficiency, allow for better coordination between teams, and create an environment where compliance and adaptation take precedence, you’ll want to find and implement a strong regulatory change management solution today.
Disclaimer: This content does not necessarily represent the views of IWB.