We are still traversing the post-financial crisis ‘convalescence’, and this is certainly difficult to handle for managers across all industries. The crisis taught us the hard way the lesson about the necessity of consistent risk management across multiple branches. Clients’ deteriorated trust is another issue of concern that must be addressed for sustainable business optimisation.
Consequently, these are times when no opportunity for growth can be missed. Indeed, more and more executives leverage the potential of enterprise automation, more specifically, of robotic process automation. ‘More and more’ is certainly not just a manner of saying; the Gartner report, for instance, envisages a 57% growth for RPA throughout 2019. Its sphere of applicability is also growing wider. We wrote several articles about specific use cases in a variety of sectors, such as transportation and logistics, telecom, HR, retail, etc.
Aside from risk management, and regaining clients’ trust by adoption of measures that increase their satisfaction, compliance is also among the problems that threaten to keep business managers awake at night. In the first place, in the post-crisis world of business, there is a need to proactively avoid the negative impact of improper compliance in the financial and operational domains of activity.
Moreover, in order to keep track of the dynamics of the risk and regulatory agenda, they have to adjust to as many as 200 individual regulatory modifications per day around the world. The Table of regulatory documents issued by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in March 2019 should provide a flavour of the pace of updating regulatory documents.
A crucial measure to adjust to this ever-changing world of compliance is taking advantage of automation platforms. So let us see in more detail how exactly robotic process automation can increase compliance.
What is regulatory compliance?
Businesses across industrial sectors, irrespective of size, location, or revenue, must ensure protection of employee, customer and operational data against natural or man-made threats, standards for fair competition and for risk management. To this end, they must comply with legal regulations that warrant data protection, legitimate market competition, and proper documentation of transactional information.
Some of the referential, most notable compliance standards include the American Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) introduced in 1996, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002, or the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) of 2002, among others.
ISO 19600:2014 is the current global standard for compliance, which has been developed by the International Organization for Standardisation (the ISO). After the adoption of the Australian AS 3806–2006, it has been superseded by AS ISO 19600:2015 as the new standard meant to help businesses with compliance management.
Challenges posed by compliance with legal regulations
Changes in the regulatory market happen with high frequency, given the need to keep pace with an ever growing number of financial crimes and, hence, risky courses of financial operations. As a result, maintenance of regulatory compliance throughout those legislative meanders is a top challenge for businesses at a global scale.
In the year 2014 (when ISO 19600 was eventually adopted), Thomson Reuters mentions a total of 40.603 alerts issued for the year, with no expectations of decrease in the near future. The need to stay congruent with the evolution of compliance requirements towards becoming more and more complex is an obstacle that requires close consideration by business executives.
But this is not all. In order to get a relatively full picture of the obstacles that stand in the way of adherence to measures of regulatory compliance you should also take into account the inefficiencies that mark operational processes, the insufficient technological capacities and executive support, or scarcity of knowledge regarding potential improvements of compliance measures.