In an environment where changes imposed by European and national legislators are constant, companies in regulated sectors (banking, insurance, health, etc.) are faced with major compliance and risk management challenges. The key to success lies in their ability to nimbly integrate these changes, relying on process automation to ensure rigorous traceability and rapid adaptation. In this search for “dynamics of compliance”, Business Process Management (BPM) tools prove to be essential allies.
The pace of regulatory developments imposed by legislators at European and national level has direct impacts on businesses. Institutions such as banks and insurance companies are particularly under the close surveillance of control bodies, which ensure the compliance of operations. For these organizations, it is not so much the frequency of regulatory changes that matters, but rather the ability to integrate them quickly. While respecting application deadlines, they must adapt their processes to respond to situations as diverse as adjustments to usury rates when granting credit, or the production of compliance documents for Tracfin.
In this context, complex process automation solutions provide robust, stable and scalable applications that can be quickly adapted by IT development teams. Thus, compliance is not a static state, but a dynamic capacity to evolve with current regulations.
Ensure traceability and compliance
Knowledge of regulations and functional mastery of complex compliance processes of course remain prerequisites for any automation. By using this automation, companies standardize their operating procedures and reduce human errors (or delay extensions). They obtain consistent quality, better traceability, precise time stamping and archiving that complies with the latest standards. They have alerts and key process indicators, such as error rate, processing times or number of complaints.
Business Process Management (BPM) tools offer a series of significant benefits when automating elaborate compliance processes. They natively integrate auditing and traceability, making it possible to track who made what decision and when, thereby meeting compliance requirements.
They offer an agile environment and a rapid development cycle to IT teams and facilitate cooperation with users. BPM tools make it possible to link heterogeneous environments together (traceability) and to ensure a certain form of compliance. This accelerates the modernization of application parks that are often obsolete, cumbersome to maintain and evolve, where legacy systems are no longer sufficient to meet needs.
Give flexibility to compliance processes
Process automation solutions, which adhere to standards such as BPMN 2.0, ensure that automated processes are built according to recognized and trusted practices. These standards facilitate the creation of tailor-made, modular processes that can be easily modified or updated without disrupting current operations, using a DevOps approach.
This same modularity proves to be a vital asset for integrating regulatory developments. The framework proposed by BPM guarantees the process (robustness, traceability, security) to meet compliance and risk management. The business application developed on the basis of a BPM makes it possible to manage changes and developments. The development effort is thus reduced. Better: the modularity of automated processes offers flexibility to manage regulatory variations by geographic location and sector, but also by specific use case. Finally, processes can be connected to external services via APIs to obtain necessary authorizations from tax or financial authorities.
In short, in highly regulated sectors, process automation via BPM tools becomes an indispensable partner for agile compliance and efficient risk management. It offers the ability to meet regulatory challenges with agility and precision that were previously unattainable with monolithic applications.