First steps towards embedded compliance

More and more, industry leaders are realising that superior compliance processes are a competitive differentiator. So it’s no surprise that investments in regulatory technology are skyrocketing: according to industry analysts, the RegTech market is predicted to grow from a 6.3bn USD market in 2020 to a 22.2bn USD market in 2027. 

Embedded compliance replaces manual compliance processes with instant, accurate and actionable answers to business units’ most pressing regulatory questions, right when and where they need them. Embedded compliance also means that those regulatory answers can be fully integrated into business teams’ existing system landscapes. Read more: what is embedded compliance?

With growing regulatory complexity, increasing regulatory divergence, and high scrutiny from regulators, financial institutions have invested in compliance like never before.

And yet, most companies’ compliance processes aren’t fit for them to operate at their full business potential. Financial institutions that stick with traditional compliance processes are bound to experience slower, less sustainable growth than their competitors that leverage embedded compliance.

Business activities such as investment advice, trading, or onboarding clients are clustered with different regulatory challenges. But they have one thing in common: the way these processes are executed has a direct impact on critical business outcomes. 

The problem is that many financial institutions are unable to keep these processes running smoothly and compliantly on a day-to-day basis because compliance knowledge is scattered, solutions are siloed and not integrated, compliance tools are not available, and resources are scarce. 

Let’s take a look at each of the basic steps involved in how embedded compliance is implemented.

1. Discovery phase

In the first phase, we will sit together with you to understand your business objectives. Through a series of conversations, we will dig deep to understand precisely what goals you would like to reach with embedded compliance. As an added benefit, we also find that these sessions help you better understand how to increase efficiency in compliance. 

2. Alignment phase

Once we understand your objectives, we go through a series of steps to align our solution to your goals:

• What is your existing approach to compliance and how can it be improved with embedded compliance?
• Does your existing approach create bottlenecks between compliance and business teams and how could those be overcome with embedded compliance? 
• What are the results you can expect from embedded compliance given similar projects that we have implemented?

What we will focus on in this phase is to understand how our standardised compliance plug-ins can be deployed in your environment. We will show you how you can leverage our products and product documentation to get up to speed with embedded compliance in an instant. 

3. Solutions phase

Once we understand your needs we can do a final mapping of your objectives to our technology and ecosystem.

We will outline how exactly we would embed compliance into your organisation to help you reach your business goals and who from our ecosystem of the world’s leading law firms would be your best partner:

• We will work with your legal and compliance experts to verify our regulatory content and to help you understand how you can adapt embedded compliance to their needs.
• We will coach your IT teams in how to design compliance by design processes and how to embed our regulatory APIs.

Depending on your needs, we will also outline how you can use our technology to digitise your own expertise.

Now that you know how embedded compliance works, it’s time to move from simply understanding it to implementing it.

Once you’ve absorbed the concept of embedded compliance, you will be able to identify dozens of issues that it can help you solve. Most of our clients start with one single issue that they solve and add more business scenarios later. 

As soon as you have started to use embedded compliance, you will also be able to unlock new countries and regulatory answers at the touch of a button – for the first time making it possible to scale your regulatory expertise.