In international trade, regulatory requirements are complex and numerous. Failing to comply with these can lead to lawsuits, financial troubles, and operational disruptions.
Regulatory compliance is essential for every organization, but navigating these requirements is challenging. In this blog, we discuss the key challenges of regulatory compliance.
Dealing with regulatory requirements: the challenges
Dealing with regulatory requirements comes with a number of serious challenges. Let’s take a brief look at the most important ones.
A scattered regulatory landscape
A major issue in regulatory compliance is that information is often scattered. Laws, rules, and policies are spread across different documents, formats, and languages, making it hard to keep policies in sync with regulatory requirements.
Changing regulatory requirements
Regulatory requirements are pretty much-moving targets. They have the tendency to keep changing and evolving, both in time and per geographic region. Therefore, understanding how rules have changed and been interpreted over time is important. This helps to grasp the true spirit and impact of a law or regulation. Without a clear historical record, it’s difficult to tell if rules are still applied correctly.
Cybersecurity and data protection
Global technological innovation has made organizations more dependent on digital technology and vulnerable to threats in the realm of cybersecurity and data protection. This has also led to an increased reliance on third-party technologies and solutions for IT and cybersecurity. Managing a complex, highly diverse technology stack can be a serious challenge for organizations, especially when IT is not their core business.
Emerging technologies
Rapidly emerging technologies, such as the newest generation of AI-powered tools and blockchain, have the potential to create new compliance challenges. Because many regulators are still catching up when it comes to dealing with these relatively novel technologies, the danger exists that you get caught off-guard by sudden legislative changes.
Not properly dealing with regulatory requirements: the consequences
Failing to resolve the aforementioned challenges can lead to several negative consequences that have the potential to not only seriously impact your business and financial and operational situation, but also your reputation.
Fines for non-compliance
Not adhering to regulatory requirements can lead to the imposition of heavy fines for non-compliance. To give you an example: GDPR infringements can lead to fines that are as high as millions of dollars or 4% of a firm’s worldwide annual revenue.
Loss of time and effort
Not adequately handling regulatory requirements can lead to a lot of wasted time and effort. If you don’t get things right the first time round, employees have to spend a lot of time and effort to fix things and limit the damage of non-compliance.
Reputational damage
Non-compliance can quickly cause customers and business partners to lose trust and loyalty. People and companies will look for alternative solutions and choose alternatives or associates that take security and compliance more seriously.
Disruption and stagnation
Improper dealings with regulatory requirements often lead to business disruptions and sinking productivity. Your business stagnates, negatively impacting your profits and competitiveness in an already competitive and demanding economic landscape.
Legal consequences
Apart from fines and penalties, other parties can also take legal action against a company and its senior management if the indicted organization doesn’t meet its regulatory obligations. Such legal proceedings lead to many extra costs and hassle.
The solution: the Be Informed Workbench
The Be Informed Workbench is our newest RegTech tool and helps you achieve regulatory compliance in even the most challenging situations. Workbench offers a centralized platform for regulatory compliance management. Users can easily import, annotate, interpret, and review regulatory sources, transforming them into machine-readable formats. These machine-readable formats form the backbone for any compliant software application, establishing a direct connection between the application and the regulatory sources. Seamless traceability reduces the risk of misinterpretation and ensures compliance efforts always align with the latest regulations.
The Workbench offers collaboration and sharing capabilities, facilitating teams to work together efficiently, fostering consistency, and enhancing compliance practices. The tool’s intuitive interface and collaborative tools promote quick adoption and agile responses to regulatory changes, making impact assessments and the implementation of necessary updates easier.
Key features of the Be Informed Workbench
The key features of the Be Informed Workbench include:
- Source management. This feature allows you to effectively organize and manage a wide and diverse plethora of regulatory sources, streamlining access and updates for compliance initiatives.
- Capturing interpretation. The Workbench offers advanced capabilities for capturing, interpreting, and translating regulatory requirements into actionable insights for even the most complex and challenging compliance operations.
- Curation. Subject matter specialists and legal experts can curate the interpreted regulatory content with the help of an insightful and professional documentation portal.
- Governance and management. The Workbench provides you with a centralized oversight and maximum control for regulatory compliance processes. This allows you to ensure perfect alignment with organizational policies and standards.
- Workbench as a service creates a flexible and scalable delivery model that provides on-demand access to the Workbench platform for seamless compliance management.
- Sharing and reusing functionalities. These allow you to share compliance knowledge and best practices, which in turn foster team efficiency and consistency.
Be Informed RegTech platform
The Workbench integrates in an organic and seamless way with the broader Be Informed RegTech platform.
- Interpret. The Be Informed Workbench allows you to interpret regulations, rules and policies in a standardized and automated way, allowing you to get the best insights regarding regulatory requirements.
- Model. Develop models that define your business and map interpreted regulatory requirements with Be Informed Studio. The Studio also gives you the opportunity to develop rule-based services to gain profound insights for compliant operations.
- Enforce. Be Informed Runtime combines the Workbench’s foundational elements, the insights from modeling (Studios), and specific domain knowledge to create end-to-end compliant applications.
Ready to perfect your regulatory compliance processes?
Staying compliant with regulatory requirements helps you to maintain business continuity and prevent financial losses, fines, penalties, and reputational damage. The Workbench and Be Informed platforms help you streamline and professionalize your compliance processes.
Be Informed is a leading RegTech and compliance software provider with a global presence across Europe, the Americas, APAC, and the Middle East. With over 20 years of experience and innovation, we specialize in transforming regulations, laws, and rules into automated, compliant day-to-day operations.
Our expertise lies in helping organizations thrive in complex and constantly evolving regulatory environments, providing them with full control, scalability, traceability, and organizational agility. From interpreting regulations to modeling decision-making processes and enforcing compliance, Be Informed ensures seamless and efficient compliance management.
