Disjointed Systems Cripple Your Global Compliance Efforts

Posted on Aug 19, 2015 11:34:00 AM

Disjointed Systems Cripple Your Global Compliance EffortsWe’ve all been there before: Whether it be global compliance, corporate finance or marketing, spreadsheet-laden processes and flawed technology systems are frustrating.

Frequent users running the day-to-day, managers providing supervision and leaders reading reports all suffer from the frustration of different forms. Team members in the trenches struggle to pull data from various, segregated sources. Managers stress the delay in preparing critical, time-sensitive reports. Leaders are unable to make confident decisions relying on these reports, which present months-old data.

The difference between such systems in marketing or finance and global compliance is the implications of such issues.

The Implications Of A Disjointed Corporate Compliance Program

No matter the area of business in which you leverage technology-laden processes, inefficiency is always costly. But implications of poor marketing decisions are typically felt over the long run. Such mistakes are largely reversible.

In the global compliance arena, one mistake or uncovered issue is a red flag that quickly alerts auditors and regulatory officials to dig deeper. What they uncover often leads to inescapable compliance penalties, which range from steeper and steeper fines to prison sentences.

In reality, a poorly-structured corporate compliance program and the absence of technological efficiencies are compliance risks in and of themselves.

How Technology Impacts Your Compliance Efforts

Integration and unified use of platforms across your organization are absolute necessities.

Consider the following common example:

Team members at your Asian legal entities leverage System A, inputting or managing their data. Your American legal entities work in System B to do the same, while your British team members use System C and periodically receive data and reports from their Asian and American counterparts.
At their London headquarters, members of your compliance department spend several hours tweaking data from Systems A and B to format it how data is represented in System C. Now, these compliance team members are able to prepare reports, albeit with stale data. The reports are presented to their chief compliance officer (CCO), who reviews it and later presents the data to the executive team.
What happens in this organization if the CEO or legal counsel request a compliance report? How long does it take the compliance team to produce this report?

This hypothetical organization operates like many multinational businesses currently do. If it has conducted critical risk assessments, do its leaders feel confident that they’ve identified their true high-risk issues. If they’ve taken action to address such issues, do they have a realistic measure of the real-time progress of such actions? 

How Global Compliance Solutions Solidify Your Efforts

Unlike the hypothetical organization above, another multinational business leverages a cloud-based compliance solution that all of its legal entities use.

Uncluttered and organized, this business’s corporate compliance program leans on a universal system to manage the grunt work of its processes. Data is uniform across the organization and housed in a single base. Rather than gathering data to produce reports, the CCO pulls reports out of the system, which showcases real-time data.

Rather than attributing time in the day to construct reports out of a disjointed system, this compliance team is empowered to focus on devising solutions to high-risk compliance areas in their business. Their efforts are truly contributing to mitigating the risks of global compliance.

Take the first step to solidifying your compliance efforts and review the 17-item checklist to a formidable compliance program.

Free Whitepaper: 17-Point Global Compliance Program Checklist