Embedded Compliance
The challenge all companies face today is complying with a variety of regulatory compliance while still maintaining a competitive level of performance growth. Executives are faced with regulators who are bombarding them with regulatory requirements on the one side, and on the other, executives are trying to attract investors and retain shareholders through progressive performance figures and innovation. To date, companies’ implementation approach to complying with different requirements has been implemented in a haphazard manner, resulting in fragmented process components, isolated performance measures and unnecessary constraints on operational resources.
What is Embedded Compliance?
Embedded Compliance is a systematic architectural approach to embedding regulatory (tax laws, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.), strategic, internal and best practice requirements into the core fibre of the organisation’s business processes. This enables the organisation to have more control over regulatory requirements and still have the ability to be competitive, agile and innovative, and control compliance investment and reporting.
Benefits of Embedded Compliance
- Closer integration of governance, risk, process management and compliance structures, forming a practical continuum underpinning the overall integrity of the organisation and aligned to innovation, business process, technology infrastructure and the achievement of strategic objectives;
- A culture that breeds the right behaviours and instils integrity into the fibre of the organisation, fostering awareness and ownership of compliance at all levels of the organisation, supported by appropriate rewards, processes and procedures.
- An extension of the role of Compliance to engage directly, and at an early stage, with those involved in tactical and strategic decision-making in areas ranging from acquisition to product development;
- A clear definition of the relationship between the business as the first line of defence; the compliance function as the second, and independent assurance and non-executive directors as the third; and
- Coherent approaches to ensuring that business processes and procedures, generally, facilitate rather than frustrate integrity and resources, and that robust technology infrastructures foster integrity-driven decision-making.
