Compliance with government regulation can place a great deal of strain on a business by necessitating considerable additional work and due diligence. While many industries face the pressures of regulatory compliance, the financial services industry in particular must carefully comply with the law and provide evidence of compliance at all times.
By leveraging a process-focused, low-code platform like Appian, businesses can help ensure ongoing compliance with regulation and rapidly adjust to ongoing changes.
Operationalize Your Knowledge
The processes that grow out of the collective hard work of an organization are some of a company’s most valuable assets, and ensuring these processes are properly leveraged is essential to any company’s ongoing success.
When it comes to regulation in the financial services industry, making sure that a company’s processes seamlessly adhere to regulatory compliance can create efficiencies for an existing workforce by offloading manual tasks and reducing moment-to-moment considerations for employees. Necessary due diligence tasks can be enforced transparently with a platform like Appian that delivers industry-leading low-code capabilities for sleek user interfaces and provide up-to-the-moment information about a business process.
A compliance review may also serve as a product in itself. Ensuring that financial services products like loans or securities are created to government standards is a valuable exercise, and one that financial services companies may contract externally to guarantee the validity of its own work. Appian provides enterprise-grade case management capabilities to assign, track, and complete these review tasks like these, while doing so in a way that takes advantage of key business processes and personnel.
Leverage Your Data
Beyond operationalizing important processes, making sure those processes continue to evolve and become more efficient is key to company growth. Determining areas for process improvement begins with looking back at a process history.
Appian provides fully customizable record keeping that can log a detailed audit trail for a process and its data points. This history can be used to satisfy the needs of data retention regulations, an internal or external audit, exception management, daily transparency for employees, or even to identify opportunities for process improvement via statistical analysis.
In general, learning from past hard work is essential for growth. The edge provided by access to comprehensive process history can help provide the necessary insight to remain competitive and compliant.
Pursue Quality
The 2008 financial crisis brought a great deal of legislative changes in its wake. In today’s financial services market, failing to comply with laws and restrictions can result in expensive or even catastrophic fines or punishments for financial services companies. Markets Insider notes that “2019 brings an additional $10 billion in fines for non-compliance with AML, KYC and sanctions regulations as post-financial crisis impact bites”. Moreover, as of 2018, “banks have been fined a staggering $243 billion since the financial crisis” (MarketWatch.com). For any financial services company, it is of the utmost importance that regulations be recognized and the compliance with these regulations carefully preserved.
Adding a quality control layer to a business process can help minimize human error by leveraging the knowledge of skilled employees and applying it where it is needed most. Particularly in the context of the 2008 financial crisis, Appian recognizes that enterprise risk management strategies used by firms in the financial district “failed them for a variety of reasons, either because they weren’t up to date, weren’t adequate to the company needs or simple human error”.
Appian’s deep suite of options for process customization can provide necessary quality checks while ensuring that employees of any knowledge level can contribute effectively. These quality checks can be further customized by leveraging process and data point history to drive a focus toward particular reviews.
Adjust Rapidly
Rapid adjustment to changing laws can create a competitive advantage for a business in the financial services vertical, where a first-mover advantage can make a tremendous difference for a company’s revenue. In 2014, the Washington Post detailed the effect of financial legislation on smaller companies, saying that “at least one local bank has expanded its compliance team seven-fold to 35 full-time employees in four years.” Creating processes that are both strong and flexible is a crucial advantage in the financial services sector, where regulations can add significant amounts of overhead for a company.
Appian can handle these ongoing changes with an easy-to-use process modeler and low-code capabilities for interface and rule design. These tools enable developers and business users to adjust for unexpected changes while continuing to deliver quality results.
Appian’s publicly available AppMarket contains examples of Electronic Know Your Customer and Compliance Checklist applications. Existing regulations like KYC and AML can be handled within the Appian platform, and compliance applications that expect the unexpected can generate new checklists on the fly.
Regardless of your business needs, the highly robust application design capabilities provided by Appian can aid in rapid iteration on ideas like these, or new solutions that are entirely fit-for-purpose. AVIO guides that journey by bringing these ideas and solutions to fruition via meticulous, detailed analysis and expert-level Appian development experience.
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Interested in learning more about how Appian can help your financial services business remain ahead of the curve? Contact us to learn about the solutions that can work for you. Also, check out the next blog in this series “AVIO and Digital Evolution: Embracing for Excellent Customer Service“