Data security plays a pivotal role in the effective management of businesses across industry verticals. A business that emphasizes on the protection of employee, customer, and operational data against natural or man-made threats is more likely to function smoothly and retain their customers’ trust. To ensure data security, businesses are expected to comply with legal regulations that ensure proper market competition, documentation of transactional information and data protection. This is known as regulatory compliance. However, ensuring compliance with legal requirements is no cakewalk as it comes with its own set of challenges. In order to navigate through these challenges and ensure seamless compliance, businesses can opt to automate their compliance activities using RPA. This brings us to the topic of this blogpost. Keep on reading to know how RPA can simplify compliance and transform your business.

Leveraging Automation for Effective Compliance

As we had already mentioned, the compliance landscape is getting increasingly complex. A major reason for this is the frequent changes in the regulatory environment and tightening of online regulations. Some of the other challenges include the lack of knowledge surrounding potential improvements of compliance measures, insufficient technological capacities, and the like. As compliance gets more complicated, it becomes challenging and expensive for businesses to navigate through them. According to the consultancy firm Duff and Phelps, regulatory costs in banking will rise from 4% to 10% of banking revenue by 2021. An automation-first approach is the answer to ensuring effective management of compliance. Before we delve into the benefits of leveraging RPA for compliance, let us take a look at the characteristics of its target processes.

  • High volume and highly manual
  • Digital data
  • Rule-based processes
  • Highly prone to human error
  • Processes with infrequent changes in steps and rules

Since compliance processes are usually of high volume and rule-based in nature, they are perfect candidates for RPA. Some of the prominent benefits enjoyed by integrating RPA into your compliance processes are:

  • Enhanced Productivity: This is the one major benefit that is shared by all processes that employ RPA. Since RPA automates repetitive tasks, employees find themselves having more time to spend on high-value tasks. Likewise, with compliance, teams can leverage RPA to carry out individual tasks that determine if the business operations are compliant. These tasks are repetitive and manually intensive, and by automating them, compliance teams can spend their time on tasks such as testing activities, judgment-based monitoring, and quality assurance.
  • Improved Auditability: Automation offers an edge to businesses by empowering them with a superior level of visibility that helps them to manage and control their internal processes log every time an action is performed. By logging in every action, RPA enables organizations to have a 100% accurate audit trail that can be accessed anytime during a compliance audit. In addition to this, RPA allows auditors to eliminate human error, see when exceptions were generated and how they were handled.
  • Efficient Compliance Management: RPA helps reduce the considerable time that is spent on collecting, compiling, and summarizing large amounts of data. With its ability to collect and compile data from multiple sources, RPA improves the efficiency of regulatory reporting.

In addition to this, RPA helps reduce costs, improves quality, and also enables better employee satisfaction. Automating compliance can help organizations to reduce legal issues and avoid lawsuits and monetary fines. By ensuring compliance and adhering to legal obligations, organizations can introduce internal safeguards that strengthen day-to-day operations. Also, by ensuring improved customer and employee retention, RPA enables organizations to build a safe business environment. The benefits rendered by RPA and its role in limiting the risk exposure of businesses to give them a competitive edge, explain why it is seen as the future of compliance.

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