Imagine competing in a swim meet with peers of your age, in similar shape, with identical training and talent. One tiny difference: you have to cross that water with an extra 50 pounds of rocks on your back. The others don’t. Tough odds? You bet. Yet, that’s the kind of unfair handicap you face on a daily basis as an executive in a regulated industry.
That additional amount of regulatory pain and complexity you have to manage seems crippling and unjust at times as associated risks, costs, and rules keep changing and expanding over time. Luckily, there’s a solution for that in 2019, and it’s called Regulatory Technology. So let’s swipe right and discover how RegTech can help you even the playing field today.
It’s all about risk and cost management
Regulatory compliance is of course about risk and cost management. Risk of losing revenue to punishing fines, but also cost of damaging brand equity, reputation, market value, and customer trust.
Recent history is littered with highly public corporate debacles of that nature.
Taming change and chaos with technology
The mounting volume, volatility, and complexity of regulations render sheer human manual compliance management approaches systemically unsound. Even if you could scale regulatory staff at will, the associated costs and productivity losses would likely be prohibitive.
Technology is more efficient and easier to budget.
With zero margins for error and customer interaction touchpoints multiplying yearly, every corporate communication channel you use now becomes a compliance risk vector. Monitoring all these manually in real time quickly becomes an error-prone nightmare (and not a very compelling job at that). Global organizations are simply too large, and their breaching points too numerous to monitor without the automated and scalable safety net RegTech can provide.
Reactivity and transparency as strategic brand assets
Then, of course, there is speed. In this digital age of instant gratification, consumer complaints can be filed online within seconds at the push of a button. Regulatory bodies like the CFPB and FTC are digitized. It takes minutes, not days, to discover infractions. And short response windows are strictly enforced.
Reaction times must follow as operational velocity and nimbleness have become strategic competitive advantages for regulated industries, and only a RegTech umbrella can provide the timely protection needed to safeguard your business ad-hoc 24/7. And the time you’ll save avoiding or fixing compliance issues can be better spent driving your sales and top line.
Shall we talk reputation? We often see how brands are perceived-sometimes defined-by the way they show reactivity and transparency when handling mistakes. Customers and Wall Street don’t demand perfection, but they certainly expect consistent messaging aligned with corporate values.
RegTech for communication command and control
As such, regulatory compliance should be part of your overall communication strategy signaling coherence, discipline, consistency and responsibility. RegTech’s ability to create dynamic rules, then automate, monitor, and enforce sales and marketing compliance requirements in real time yields key strategic communication benefits for regulated entities who care about their reputation and long-term value.
Getting your compliance analytics house in order
They say you can’t manage what you can’t measure. And if you can’t easily and quickly report on or audit compliance history across the entire business, you risk losing damaging legal battles too…or not preventing them in time. What’s worse, without consistent data and metrics, problems and weaknesses cannot be discovered or fixed.
RegTech provides consistent and coherent reporting across all lines of business. Because the last thing you need during a regulatory investigation is to waste time hunting for compliance data in different formats across multiple business silos.
Become a corporate innovation leader
Last but not least, most people may not associate RegTech with transformational business initiatives. But they’re misguided. Because we’re a long way from traditional piecemeal on-premise compliance tools. A flurry of modern advances in cloud-based software deployment (SaaS), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applied to the RegTech sector has clearly earned it a cost-effective placemat at the corporate innovation table lately. And as an executive in your organization, that’s one table you definitely want to grab a seat at.
In 2019, winning the race while staying afloat of regulatory pressures in your industry is hard enough. So dump the extra weight and spend more time focusing on sales with RegTech. Visit us to start your journey here!
PerformLine 
Gianna Kennedy