Making a case for policy management software

Creating, updating, communicating and tracking organizational policies and procedures is often a manual process that costs compliance professionals hundreds of hours each year to effectively manage.

Keeping compliant with all relevant policies and procedures is a critical enough responsibility that financial services organizations should consider a solution that can help make this oversight run more efficiently.

Policies establish and communicate compliance responsibilities to employees, address legal requirements and ensure compliance obligations are incorporated into business processes. Regulators consistently say maintaining and communicating leadership-approved policies and procedures is a key part of any compliance management system (CMS).

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s examination procedures, “Examiners should seek to determine whether compliance policies and procedures are consistent with board-approved compliance policies (and) are maintained and modified to remain current and complete, and to serve as a reference for employees in their day-to-day activities.”

Unfortunately, financial services organizations often don’t meet regulators’ policy expectations. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has said that policies are historically the leading category of “matters requiring board attention.”

This is not surprising. At many financial services organizations, policy management is largely a disjointed process that relies on email, word processing, spreadsheets and a company intranet to manage large-scale compliance updates.

The result is wasted hours on tasks that technology can assist with or fully automate, including:

• Researching regulatory changes
• Identifying impacted policies
• Coordinating efforts to create and update policies
• Identifying appropriate policy language
• Documenting change decisions for regulators
• Communicating policy changes to all impacted employees
• Tracking employee acknowledgements
• Establishing a policy and procedure repository for employees

Policy management software specifically designed for the financial services industry is a potential game changer for compliance professionals. When selecting a new policy management software, it’s important to find an end-to-end solution built specifically for financial services organizations. Key features to compare include:

Industry-specific regulatory resources: Policy management software should help financial services leaders make informed decisions with greater clarity and confidence. Specifically, the solution should include regulatory alerts, policy considerations for regulatory updates, policy templates and regulation overviews.

Easy setup and administration: Implementing new software should be a quick and easy process. Features like bulk imports of existing users and documents will ensure all of your data gets transferred quickly to your new policy system in one upload instead of requiring a manual process to reenter that data.

The solution should also include configurable and reusable workflows, a human resources information system (HRIS) data exchange, an industry-specific table of contents and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities. These features guide administrators through the system so they know how to easily set up user profiles, input information and communicate with other users to manage company policies quickly and effectively.

Focused processes: Regulators require that policies and procedures are updated and communicated in a timely manner. Look for policy management software that includes due dates, reminder emails, report subscriptions and audit change reports, as well as dashboards for both employees and managers. These tools help everyone stay on their scheduled tasks, so the organization will be ready for an examination.

Powerful communication tools: Tracking employee policy and procedure acknowledgments is critical and automating parts of that process can save a tremendous amount of time. That said, having efficient policy acknowledgement is a minimum requirement—you also want to be confident that employees grasp the policy.

Look for a policy management solution that incorporates other features to ensure policies and procedures are communicated effectively. These include a quizzing function to determine if recent changes are understood and a centralized repository with full text search so employees can easily find the current versions of policies and procedures. Bookmarking is also a helpful function so employees can pin relevant policies and procedures to a dashboard for quick reference. The ability to communicate and reinforce policies and procedures effectively is crucial to building a culture of compliance.

Policy management software should provide a solution to make your organization’s policy management process less expensive and easier to manage. When selecting new software, it’s important to compare it to the costs and time associated with each of the above factors of your current policy management processes to see where efficiencies can be gained.

Learn more about the new BAI Policy Manager and the benefits to your organization.

Christopher Boersma, CRCM, CAMS, CISA is a product manager at BAI.