Automated Compliance for Better, More Secure Reporting

Organizations are lost in mountains of day-to-day operations, while the risk of non-compliance bears a hefty fine and potential reputational damage. Manually analyzing and reporting on compliance can take days or weeks, leaving organizations open to several fail points.

Amidst these winding roads to success is compliance automation. Compliance automation is a compass of conduct, to help organizations ensure compliance without wasting too many resources or effort on reporting and standardizing.

What Is Compliance Automation?

Compliance automation is using technologies like intelligent automation (IA) to continuously monitor systems and ensure they’re following industry regulations. Compliance automation replaces the manual processes of tracking compliance procedures and keeps all the documentation in one place.

What’s intelligent automation?

Intelligent automation (IA) links robotic process automation (RPA), which mimics human actions to automate repetitive tasks, with artificial intelligence (AI), which mimics human intelligence. IA also includes business process management (BPM), which automates and manages workflows. IA can automate compliance tasks and processes to help organizations reduce their manual effort.

What does compliance automation enable?

As regulatory requirements and laws become stricter, compliance is essential in helping organizations remain transparent and avoid penalties and fines. Technologies like IA can help organizations develop a robust compliance strategy that can effectively adapt to meet evolving regulatory requirements.

Compliance regulations could be the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), among others. They’re rules or laws laid out by regulators and often result in fines or penalties if not adhered to.

How does automated compliance work?

Compliance automation tools categorize data and systems while ensuring the protection of sensitive information, in line with the applicable required regulations. Compliance automation collects, controls and analyzes data throughout its lifecycle and generates alerts if the analysis reveals any violations or inconsistencies. This is exceptionally useful in risk mitigation and fraud detection.

How Do You Automate a Compliance Process?

To automate your compliance workflow, you can set up rules-based instructions for your digital workers to follow without requiring human intervention. Rather than manually monitoring your data for compliance, IA can automatically renew, track and analyze data, alerting you when issues arise.

Your compliance automation should include the following steps:

1. Risk assessment: Document all applicable regulations and standards in your industry and any internal policies you need to comply with.
2. Process mapping: Once you’ve identified your compliance requirements, map out your current compliance workflows and processes. This will help you pinpoint any areas that could be optimized. Tools like task mining and process mining can help with this process. SS&C | Blue Prism® Capture helps you accurately capture and optimize your as-is processes and provides a detailed Process Definition Document (PDD) for transparent reporting.
3. Choose your software: Evaluate the various automation software and tools and find one that suits your compliance needs. Consider features such as functionality, system integration, scalability and security. SS&C | Blue Prism® Enterprise allows you to securely deploy a robust digital workforce into your operations.
4. Implement and integrate: Deploy your automation into your processes, ensuring data security and privacy. Configure your automation with your workflows and set up rules for how your compliance data is collected, validated and reported, along with any notifications you’ll need.
5. Continually monitor: Ensure you apply continuous monitoring and reporting by looking at the real-time reports. This will ensure compliance performance is tracked correctly and any issues are addressed immediately.

Throughout all these steps, ensure your people understand how the tools and technology work and apply to them. Training and education are crucial to maintaining good compliance procedures in your organization.

What is compliance automation software?

Automated compliance software often includes self-assessments, corrective action planning, controls analysis and testing. By automating these critical manual checks, you can speed up your time to gather the right information without the risk of human errors or slowdowns.

A secure, robust digital workforce is crucial to the success and sustainability of your automation compliance program. SS&C Blue Prism security, privacy and compliance live at the core of our development ethos. We designed our IA platform with the latest security standards and protocols and continue to develop and improve our processes to keep you safe from the latest threats. Our security exists at every layer – software, infrastructure and applications – embodied in these three areas:

1. Company-level security: All employees undergo mandated information security training, and only authorized users have access to data and systems.
2. Application security: Security vulnerabilities are identified as early as possible in the development lifecycle.
3. Cloud operations security: Continuous scanning and monitoring help maintain security beyond deployment.

What Are The Benefits of Compliance Automation?

By automating compliance procedures, organizations can see positive impacts in security, reporting and cost savings, among others. Some measurable benefits of compliance automation are included below.

Increased efficiency

While manual processes are prone to human error – costing wasted time, effort and money – automated processes are efficient and streamlined, producing high-quality results faster.

Real-time data

Most compliance automation software consolidates the collected compliance data in one unified dashboard. Rather than tracking multiple applications and spreadsheets, you gain access to real-time data insights as they’re collected. And with notification alerts addressing non-compliance, problems can be addressed immediately, resulting in faster decision-making.

Reduced compliance risks

Because automation can flag potential issues right away, there’s less chance your organization will fall into non-compliance. Automation also reduces errors and the time to gather information, allowing you to mitigate risk by continuously (and automatically) monitoring your systems for vulnerabilities.

Connected systems

IA makes it easier to establish a consistent standard that can be scaled across departments and systems. This helps organizations maintain compliance and also ensures data security by monitoring it at every level.

What Are Examples of Regulatory Compliance?

Compliance automation can apply to any industry, but its benefits are especially key to organizations in heavily regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare and the public sector. These organizations should look for a regulatory compliance solution that automates non-compliance notifications and utilizes a robust information security management system.

Let’s look at some industry use cases requiring regulatory compliance.

Financial services

IA delivers a new way of working for risk and compliance teams by deploying digital workers to take on the most time-consuming and resource-hungry financial services processes, such as know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) checks.

Banking automation can speed up manual compliance tasks and free up time for employees so they can focus on higher-value customer-facing or upskilling work. With digital workers automating these processes and building clear audit trails, financial institutions gain better insights into their workflows. Digital workers improve reporting by working in near real-time and with 100% accuracy, faster than their human counterparts, and they can detect pattern anomalies and flag potentially fraudulent activity. This, in turn, accelerates the compliance team’s response times since they have access to the relevant data sooner.

To learn more about how you can address the complexity of risk and compliance through IA, read the International Compliance Association (ICA) report on building a new kind of workforce.

Healthcare

IA streamlines healthcare regulations, like HIPAA in the U.S., by automating patient data protection, auditing and reporting. Automated claims validation ensures accuracy and compliance in billing regulations, and automated coding and documentation reduces errors and identifies issues before submission.

Read the comprehensive guide on healthcare automation to learn more about automating processes to improve compliance and patient care.

Public sector

Governments need to meet strict levels of governance and compliance requirements. IA ensures data is shared across agencies securely and accurately. Digital workers can digitize compliance monitoring and also ensure transparency in regulatory processes such as taxes, audits and investigations.

Learn more about IA and RPA use cases in the government public sector, from compliance to serving citizens better.

Other examples of compliance automation can include:

• Employee onboarding and offboarding.
• Contract management.
• Environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting.
• Quality assurance and validation.
• Audit trails and documentation.
• Security posture of cybersecurity readiness.
• Food safety and quality control.
• Evidence collection and automated timestamps.

The Compliance Compass

Compliance automation is your compass to success, with easier, faster and more accurate reporting that keeps your organization compliant, and your people freed from repetitive tasks.

Find out how you can adopt intelligent automation into your organization.