As the industry, business, and the legislative environment keep evolving and iterating practical methods to keep up with regulatory changes become not only difficult but also mandatory.
In today’s business era, regulatory developments are one of the most challenging changes to keep up with. It is not easy for small or large businesses to keep up with the changes as they can quickly become a burden to an organisation’s resources.
Strategies for staying regulatory current must not only be modern but effective. Honing in on what is relevant for your company, as overwhelm can quickly become a problem, but equally pertinent changes slipping the net can lead to devastating breaches.
Therefore, here are 5 golden techniques that one can use to keep up with regulatory changes.
1. Stay Informed – One of the Most Important Practical Strategies to Keep Up with Regulatory Changes
Regulatory changes are dynamic. They evolve and change daily. In that case, any firm needs to change and evolve with it. In some instances, it becomes challenging for firms to stay informed all the time. To tackle the lack of information, firms may follow these 2 key practices.
Keep a Tab of All the Regulatory Changes
Every business firm needs to be proactive in keeping tabs on all upcoming regulatory changes which will affect the business and industry they operate in.
As soon as a new regulatory change is announced, one should seek legal counsel who has specialised expertise in the legislative area in question using websites such as Legal 500. Keeping good relations with carefully chosen law firms will help you stay abreast of potential changes you need to make due to regulatory updates.
Enrolling in the newsletters of specialist law firms who are also practitioners in implement regulatory change is a low effort but a high-impact way of staying up to date.
Monitor Websites of Governing Agencies and Regulatory Bodies
While many news and media outlets will provide instantaneous cliff notes on a mainstream change in regulation, to gain a comprehensive understanding of a legislative update nothing beats going directly to the source.
Going to the source means nuance doesn’t get lost in translation but also provides specifics on thresholds for certain requirements and any deadlines involved with the update.
Considering all market niches, there could be hundreds of changes. Keeping a tab manually on domain-specific regulatory changes is tough.
Instead of doing so, it would be good to leverage RSS Feed Reader to keep up with regulatory changes.
RSS Feed Reader is an automated system, which can retrieve information from regulatory agency websites and law firms pertaining to any business domain.
A simpler alternative is to utilise a content change detection and notification service. These services scan the web for changes you wish to be informed about from certain keywords or websites and then sends you an email when it finds new results.
Great notification services that can be used to track regulatory changes are Google Alerts, Talkwalker Alerts, Mention, and Meltwater.
2. Attend Online Conferences and Events to Get Latest Updates Regarding Regulatory Changes
Online Conferences and webinars are not only a means of networking and growing connections but are also great to make one aware of new regulation changes.
Here’s How Conferences and Events Can Keep A Firm Updated:
- Highly relevant online conferences and webinars can provide insightful ways to implement regulatory changes
- If a change takes place, they provide a forum hear and learn from experts and ask questions to clear your doubts in real-time.
3. Review Internal Processes to Follow Up with Regulatory Changes
After becoming aware of a regulatory shift, the next step would be to conduct an internal audit to assess your current level of compliance and look for potential gaps in existing practices compared to the new requirements.
This means if there any potential risks of breach you can find them early and have enough time to address the gaps.
As a proactive strategy, internal process audits should be conducted regularly. If an organisation establishes the habit of process review it will be able to more readily identify potential risks and/or changes as a result of upcoming or released regulatory change.
4. Use a Compliance Software and Review it Regularly
Compliance management software might be one of the most productive tools for regulatory management ever conceived. They streamline, centralize, and automate all compliances related processes. An excellent way to find such software is to go to the Planet Compliance RegTech Directory. (if we do say so ourselves).
With these tools, one can follow up with the best practices for any regulatory changes.
5. Build a S.W.O.T Team to Keep Track of Regulatory Changes
Every firm needs a team of professionals to handle the regulatory changes. Without a dedicated team or person coping with fast-moving regulatory changes can become difficult and, in some cases, impossible.
The team should be passionate, knowledgeable, and relentless about achieving maintaining compliance to protect the firm from breaches. They should see it as their mission regardless of whether it is their main duty or not.
The work of a carefully selected team will not only minimise risk but also minimise the time the rest of the organisation spends on regulatory monitoring.
Final Point: Inform clients on how regulatory changes affect them
If a legislative change is going to affect your clients be sure to carefully think through and communicate to them what they can expect going forward.
Clients should be made aware of changes your firm is going to make that could affect service, communication and requirements between you and them as part of your business relationship. Always provide clients with enough forewarning so they can also prepare and adapt to changes caused by regulatory updates.
Monitoring and managing the regulatory changes in any domain is never easy. We trust that some of the guidance provided can at least lighten the load.