Navigating Regulatory Compliance Challenges in Financial Services with Progress Corticon

Use the Corticon BRMS to help your financial services organization handle regulatory compliance—accelerating response time, reducing manual effort and improving accuracy.

The financial services industry faces a barrage of regulatory requirements that evolve constantly. As a business leader, keeping your organization compliant is critical, but also time-consuming and stressful. What if there was a way to simplify compliance using intelligent automation?

Progress Corticon is a business rules management system (BRMS) that can help transform how you handle regulatory compliance. By capturing rules in an intuitive format, Corticon enables you to respond rapidly to changes, reduce manual efforts, increase accuracy and provide audit trails—all while boosting productivity and lowering costs. If staying on the right side of regulations keeps you up at night, it’s time to consider an automated approach. Corticon uses natural language rules to model complex logic across regulations so you can focus on running your business, not chasing every new rule.

How Regulation Impacts Financial Services

As a financial institution, regulation impacts nearly every area of your business. Staying on top of the complex web of rules and requirements is a constant challenge that can be overwhelming without the right strategy and tools.

To start, you need visibility into exactly which regulations apply to your specific products and services. Requirements often vary based on factors like customer type, account balances and transactions. Simply put, you can’t comply with rules you don’t know about or don’t fully understand.

Once you have a handle on the applicable regulations, you must interpret them and determine how to operationalize compliance within your organization. This means updating policies, procedures, controls and systems to properly monitor, test and report on compliance. For example, if a new rule requires additional customer data or disclosures, you’ll need to modify account opening processes, update digital experiences, retrain staff and more.

Staying compliant also demands ongoing monitoring and auditing to identify potential issues quickly. Both automated alerts and manual reviews are required to catch errors, gaps and changes that could put you at risk of violations or fines. Finally, producing the reporting and documentation required by regulators in an accurate and timely manner is essential. This includes everything from examination reports to suspicious activity reports to complaint management and resolution.

The Challenges of Manual Compliance Processes

If your financial institution is still relying on manual processes for regulatory compliance, you know how tedious and error-prone it can be. Keeping up with constantly changing regulations across global markets is practically a full-time job in itself. Trying to interpret new rules, update static documents, spreadsheets and systems, and roll out policy changes across your organization can be frustrating and time-consuming. Not to mention the risk of mistakes, inconsistencies and non-compliance that comes with manual processes. Some challenges include:

Risk of Outdated or Inaccurate Information

With compliance rules and requirements frequently updating, it’s easy for staff to miss a change or have trouble keeping all the details straight. If you’re not using an automated system, you have to manually review and update every policy, procedure and control when regulations change.

Inefficiency and High Costs

Manual compliance processes are highly inefficient, requiring staff to spend hours researching requirements, updating documents and maintaining audit trails. The costs in both time and money can be staggering.

Lack of Visibility and Transparency

When compliance is managed through spreadsheets, documents and siloed systems, it’s difficult to get an enterprise-wide view of compliance controls and reporting. Automated compliance systems provide full visibility and auditability through centralized policy storage, version control and reporting dashboards.

Risk of Non-Compliance

Ultimately, the biggest risk with manual compliance processes is the possibility of non-compliance leading to penalties, fines and damage to your reputation. Automated compliance solutions help you stay on top of all obligations and are audit-ready at any time.

Why Automation is Key to Compliance Success

Compliance is complex, with regulations constantly changing and new rules being issued regularly. Keeping up with it all manually is nearly impossible and extremely time-consuming. Automation is critical to achieving compliance success and avoiding penalties. By automating, you get to:

Reduce Manual Effort

Automating compliance processes significantly reduces the amount of manual effort involved. Manual reviews, monitoring, testing and reporting are labor-intensive and prone to human error. Automation handles many of these repetitive, mundane tasks so your compliance team can focus on higher-value work.

Gain Real-Time Insights

Automated compliance solutions provide real-time visibility into risks and issues. They continuously monitor for compliance violations and irregularities, alerting you to problems as soon as they arise. With automated reporting and dashboards, you have an up-to-the-minute view of compliance status across the organization. This real-time insight allows you to take corrective action quickly.

Establish Consistency

An automated system applies rules and processes uniformly every time. This consistency results in fewer errors and less variability in how regulations are interpreted and enforced. Standardized, automated compliance checks also facilitate auditing by providing detailed records of all monitoring, testing and issue resolution activities.

Adapt to Change

Regulations change often, and automation makes it easier to adapt. When new rules are issued, you can update your compliance platform to immediately begin enforcing them. Automation also allows for efficient retesting when systems or processes change. With automation, you have an agile compliance infrastructure that can scale and evolve to match the dynamic regulatory environment.

How Corticon Addresses Key Compliance Use Cases

Financial institutions face an onslaught of regulations they must comply with to avoid penalties and legal issues. Corticon can help address many common compliance use cases to reduce risk:

Policy and Procedure Management

Creating and maintaining policies and procedures that align with current regulations is a monumental task. Corticon provides a centralized repository to store all your policies, procedures, controls and regulatory rule libraries in one place. It allows easy access and editing, version control and audit trails to demonstrate compliance.

Transaction Screening

Screening individual transactions in real-time for compliance can be challenging at scale. Corticon utilizes business rules and complex event processing to screen transactions, detect anomalies and prevent regulatory violations before they happen. This helps in reducing false positives and processing compliant transactions efficiently. 

Reporting and Dashboards

Producing reports to demonstrate compliance across the organization and provide insights into control effectiveness is extremely difficult to do manually. Corticon offers out-of-the-box reports and dashboards that provide real-time visibility into compliance metrics, KPIs, control issues and audit findings. This gives executives and regulators the transparency they need.

Audits and Examinations

Surviving audits and examinations with limited resources and time requires extensive preparation and documentation. Corticon provides tools to help streamline audit preparation by giving auditors access to all policies, procedures, controls and reports in one system. This reduces the burden on staff and helps produce a successful audit with minimal findings.

Corticon in Action: Real-World Customer Success Stories

Pincvision, a Dutch technology company, faced challenges in swiftly implementing trade compliance changes for its multinational customers. By adopting Progress Corticon Business Rules Management System, Pincvision eliminated the need for IT involvement, enabling faster implementation of regulatory updates. Corticon centralized compliance rules, allowing for easy changes without altering production code. It provided integrity checks and verified the completeness and correctness of rules, reducing errors. Pincvision democratized business knowledge and integrated diverse data sources. As a result, Pincvision responded to regulatory changes in real-time, onboarded new customers 70% faster, and experienced 30% business growth. Read more here.

Concluding Thoughts

Regulation introduces complexity at every turn for financial institutions. But with the right strategy, technology and partners, compliance doesn’t have to be a burden. Solutions like Progress Corticon help automate key processes, reduce risk, increase accuracy and provide the oversight you need to navigate regulatory challenges with confidence

By leveraging Corticon, institutions can model regulations as modular, easy-to-understand business rules for clarity and accuracy in compliance efforts. Automating the application of rules across systems results in consistent enforcement of regulations and allows financial institutions gain end-to-end governance and auditability over rules and their application, providing compliance officers and auditors with visibility and oversight.

Check out Corticon here.