At some point I stopped counting. I stopped trying to keep a list of the compliance related scandals that were making it to the front pages of newspapers globally, and trying to keep in mind the amount of dollars that were lost in fines. I just know it is becoming astronomical. Big enough in fact that it has been commonly accepted that it is no longer a matter of “if” organizations will be at breach but rather a matter of “when”.
Since the 2008 crisis, compliance spending and scandals were associated with the finance and banking sector, but the fear of being inflicted with heavy fines is common to a lot of industries: retail, insurance, or telecoms. The complexity of regulatory requirements is going well beyond the realm of banking.
Where is the Gap?
Between the heavy regulatory requirements and the quasi-certainty that organizations would be at risk, there is a gap, one that shows that there is a need for innovative technologtechnol solutions – RegTech compliance. RegTech is here to make it easier to comply with regulatory requirements.
Here at NICE’s recording product house, we have been addressing compliance with technology for over 20 years; but our recent releases are focused on addressing that gap. By leveraging our existing recording solutions with analytics and real time capabilities, we are seeking to bring innovation to the world of compliance. With Engage, the compliance center is essentially bringing together our advanced standards and experience, with our analytics platform to reduce vulnerabilities, prevent breach, and boost the efficiency of all relevant stakeholders of the contact center: IT, compliance and agents.
We bridge two sets of capabilities: analytical and operational ones. With dedicated dashboards, real time alerts, and dedicated compliance KPIs and thresholds, we can detect even the most minor deviations from what should be done according to regulations. This includes, amongst other capabilities, the ability to detect force deletion failures, the accuracy of the sales consent or even suspected PCI violations. We also enable our users to perform actions based on the insights they previously received. Whether they wish to investigate or extract interactions for further analysis , they can opt to take proactive or corrective actions.
I believe this is the very foundation of successful RegTech compliance: creating a best of breed software using capabilities that help companies across all sectors comply with regulatory requirements, and making the data meaningful in a way that will help all the users of the contact center make a decision and act upon it.
What makes RegTech compliance successful?
Ernst & Young’s “Innovating with RegTech” report, states that key long-term benefits to RegTech range from: the ability to create a positive customer experience, increased market stability, improved governance and enhance regulatory reporting In practice, I have witnessed that the most successful deployments of our customers were those that simplified and standardized compliance practices, and managed to offload the most repetitive tasks from IT and compliance teams. In the past, if they had to manually check interactions for breaches or to review a log, they now have dedicated workflows and proactive alerts to reduce the amount of tedious effort required to find needles in the haystack. For our business users, the Compliance Center drives down the costs associated with compliance and risks, and enables enterprise-wide governance with the appropriate frameworks to seamlessly link activities and systems, which makes it successful beyond the IT domains, reaching all the way to the agents’ desktops. Last but not least, and this is what has been driving our product efforts with the compliance center: it should enable a compliance by design approach, whereby regulatory compliance is built in an organization’s business and operational practices. For our customers, this is what truly makes a difference for all contact center personas. It makes it easier for them to abide by the requirements of the most stringent regulations and introduces a differentiator in their efforts to enhance the trust relationship between them and their customers, as well as with regulators.What’s the future of RegTech?
To some extent, the future of RegTech is being written by the newest regulations. With key regulations such as GDPR putting “state of the art solution” as part of their requirements, innovation is not something that can be ignored, and RegTech compliance becomes a requirement. In the Multi-Channel Recording product house, we are working hard to make sure that the technology we develop creates bridges to really simplify the compliance processes for our customers of all sizes and verticals, globally; and that we bring innovative solutions with this new release, including compliance dedicated apps using cloud computing.
The future of RegTech is already here, the question is: how fast can organizations and regulators adopt these to power better risk management practices and frameworks?