Modern organizations face an unprecedented pace of regulatory change, especially in the financial industry and in sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, and energy. These rules and regulations are meant to protect consumers, prevent exploitative industrial practices, and ethical corporate behaviors.
Keeping up with that pace of change, however, can tax even sophisticated businesses. To manage the task (and avoid the many costs of non-compliance), companies need automation technology that can scan the regulatory horizon, anticipate global regulatory developments, and maintain a strong compliance posture.
This is where automated regulatory intelligence, otherwise known as ARI, comes in.
How Do Automated Regulatory Intelligence Solutions Work?
An ARI solution automates compliance workflows to simplify how organizations comply with a host of laws and regulations. ARI applies cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), and natural language processing (NLP) to streamline fragmented regulatory change processes.
These technologies deliver multiple crucial insights all into one place, to simplify the management of regulatory developments. An ARI solution eliminates the need to manually track multiple sources of regulatory information. Instead, it provides automated ingestion pipelines and intelligent search to create customized monitoring profiles, which allow compliance teams to keep up with business-relevant compliance changes.
The best ARI platforms automate the entire compliance journey to reduce cycle time, and maintain continuous compliance with global regulatory developments. These solutions also understand a firm’s compliance needs in the context of their specific business, and enable compliance personnel to map applicable regulations to required compliance controls and policies.
The Need for Automated Regulatory Intelligence
In the pre-ARI world, organizations relied on manual processes to:
- Research regulatory insights
- Track and manage regulatory affairs and changes
- Catalog and process data from various regulatory authorities and regimes
- Create country-specific submission strategies
- Complete submission applications
- Respond to inquiries
These time-consuming and error-prone tasks exposed firms to the financial and reputational risks of non-compliance. They also had to pay for expensive subscriptions to access curated regulatory intelligence datasets, increasing costs without guaranteeing a stronger compliance posture. ARI eliminates that manual work and eliminates the need for dataset subscriptions.
ARI is also vital to keep up with the pace of change in the regulatory landscape. Numerous corporate conduct scandals in the recent past are partly responsible for the increased volume and velocity of these changes; so are emerging issues such as public demand for stronger data privacy and the increasing focus on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors.
Consequently, this landscape now encompasses a huge number of rules, requirements, and updates. Organizations need access to updated regulatory data from multiple regimes to comply with all these rules. This is only possible with ARI.
The Benefits of Automated Regulatory Intelligence
In the modern regulatory environment, the costs of non-compliance can be severe for organizations. In addition to hefty fines, they may face civil lawsuits, legal and audit fees, and reputational damage. To avoid those unwanted outcomes, companies must keep up with regulatory changes and anticipate them whenever possible.
Legacy search and analysis tools are inadequate to meet these needs. They force compliance teams to perform manual searches, which slows the compliance process and exposes the organization to multiple compliance risks. Today, the only way to achieve compliance sustainability and efficiency is with ARI solutions.
Global coverage and real-time regulatory insights
ARI collects AI-enabled global regulatory intelligence from thousands of regulatory bodies and materials in one place. With ARI, compliance teams can ingest and catalog a vast volume of regulatory data and track their historical data on submissions and regulatory agency exchanges.
The automated model allows personnel to track business-relevant regulatory developments easily. Then, they can build appropriate enterprise policies around applicable regulations using sophisticated AI and highly-trained datasets.
Automated compliance processes in the context of the business
An ARI platform understands where an organization’s compliance responsibilities intersect with its specific business. That helps compliance teams to streamline many stages of its regulatory change journey, such as:
- Finding the causes of potential compliance risks
- Regulatory data search, capture, and standardization
- Creating, updating, and managing regulatory inventories
- Alerting and notifications
Some ARI solutions also automate the impact analysis process, which can serve as the starting point for other compliance processes, such as:
- Risk management
- Gap analysis
- Compliance planning
- Compliance reporting
Intelligent search and support for insights curation
Cutting-edge ARI platforms include cognitive search models, which provide a ranked list of relevant search results. Enterprise personnel can filter and curate these results based on the organization’s specific compliance needs.
Augment human capabilities with technology for high-value decision making
The platform streamlines manual tasks with AI, NLP, semantic search, and other modern technologies so teams can focus on high-value decisions. It augments their human capabilities with AI-based, data-driven predictions to help implement tailored, auditable, effective compliance programs.
Regulatory Compliance vs. Regulatory Intelligence
Regulatory compliance refers to an organization’s adherence to the laws and regulations that apply to its industry and business processes. Companies need compliance programs and supporting tools, processes, policies, and procedures to achieve and maintain such adherence.
A well-functioning compliance program helps organizations to comply with applicable regulations, demonstrate compliance to customers and other stakeholders, and avoid the financial and legal costs of non-compliance. Compliance programs also help organizations to attain their business goals, establish a solid reputation, and even improve their profitability.
Regulatory intelligence combines information and technology to help businesses comply with various regulatory standards. With ARI, firms can improve their awareness of regulatory changes and adapt to them to maintain compliance (and avoid the costs of non-compliance).
All in all, automated regulatory intelligence:
- Is a crucial element of enterprise governance, risk, and compliance programs
- Provides actionable, AI-enabled insights to monitor regulatory changes
- Helps compliance teams to map regulations to the company’s policies, controls, and protocols
- Reduces approval timelines and transforms compliance data into a competitive advantage
The 3 Crucial Components of Automated Regulatory Intelligence
Organizations can choose a passive or active approach to ARI. Both approaches involve automatically ingesting regulatory data to increase the speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of compliance programs; they differ in how they source regulatory data and in how much specialized knowledge is required to operate the program.
In the passive approach, compliance team members collect, analyze, and disseminate publicly available compliance data. Little specialized knowledge is required. Since this approach is less targeted, it is best for identifying broad compliance trends and developments.
The active approach is more targeted, meaning it requires sourcing regulatory information that’s relevant to the specific company. It is more time-consuming, but also the best choice when organizations need specific intelligence about regulatory developments or changes.
Regardless of which approach a company adopts, ARI encompasses three key crucial components:
Data analysis
ARI platforms provide global (or near-global) coverage of regulatory bodies and materials, as well as customizable monitoring profiles. These capabilities synthesize inputs from a wide variety of sources and reduce the need for manual searches.
Powered by NLP and machine learning capabilities, the ARI solution processes search queries, filters out irrelevant data, and suggests useful answers. Compliance personnel can easily analyze all the presented information to understand relevant regulatory trends and respond to them appropriately.
Strategic action
The ARI platform enables regulatory intelligence professionals to determine the actions required to respond to regulatory developments. These teams can communicate with internal or external stakeholders, make better decisions, and assure that the organization remains compliant regardless of any shifting regulatory landscape.
Monitoring
Companies can only keep up with regulatory changes if they know about them. ARI platforms automatically scan the regulatory landscape to help compliance teams understand the current climate, anticipate future changes, and tweak their regulatory strategy.
Manage and Streamline Your Compliance Program with the Reciprocity ROAR Platform
The Reciprocity® ROAR Platform unifies Risk Observation, Assessment, and Remediation (ROAR) to help organizations streamline compliance data management, monitoring, and analysis.
ROAR generates a real-time view of your organization’s risk and compliance landscape that’s framed around your business priorities. This way, you will get the contextual and detailed insights you need to maintain your risk and compliance programs and quickly act on your IT and cyber risks.
The platform includes a built-in content library so you can easily keep up with ever-changing regulatory requirements. It also provides step-by-step guidance to help you confidently manage your compliance- and risk-related activities.
ROAR can break down the silos causing inefficiencies and gaps in your compliance program. Moreover, its trusted, single source of truth will guide and inform your strategic business decisions. Schedule a demo to learn more.