Compliance Horizon Report - 2018

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The compliance department is not an island.  It needs more support from employees across the business but is confident that technology can help.

Getting staff across the business to take responsibility for compliance can make the biggest difference to the effectiveness of compliance programmes.  However, it is also the most difficult thing for compliance professionals to achieve, according to new research from The Risk Advisory Group.

Almost a third (30 per cent) of senior compliance professionals surveyed for the firm’s annual global Compliance Horizon Report – 2017 said that achieving staff buy-in is the biggest challenge they face in their role.  Monitoring staff to check they are following company policies is their next biggest challenge (cited by 17 per cent).  They find both of these more difficult than keeping on top of mounting levels of regulation and preparing the business to comply.

There is a real sense that the compliance department cannot operate in a vacuum and that it needs more support from across the organisation in order to be effective.  The help required is neither more money nor more skills – 88 per cent of compliance professionals are confident of having the right amount of these – but a change in attitude.  66 per cent of senior compliance professionals said that employees taking greater ownership of compliance would have  the biggest impact on  their ability to protect the business to the level required.  This would explain why company-wide compliance training is such a major priority for the year ahead.

Over half of survey respondents said that they will be turning to technology to improve the effectiveness of their compliance programmes.  59 per cent expect to use compliance technology more in 2018 than they currently do. They see the main benefits of doing so as improved efficiency (30 per cent) followed by transparency and traceability (27 per cent).

Commenting on the findings Rebecca Palser, Director, The Risk Advisory Group said, “Despite the challenges they face, the compliance professionals we spoke to were overwhelmingly upbeat.   When asked to sum up the year ahead in a single word, they were most likely to say they were feeling optimistic, positive or confident.

“A new-found trust in technology could go some way to explaining this.  This is the first year since we launched our Compliance Horizon report that technology has featured so prominently.  We expect to see a corresponding rise in demand for our LUMA third party compliance management platform, as compliance professionals increasingly recognise the difference technology can make to their compliance programmes.”

For additional information or to speak to a Risk Advisory expert please contact:
The Risk Advisory Group
020 7578 0000
media@riskadvisory.com

About The Compliance Horizon 2017
The Compliance Horizon 2017 report is based on an online survey of 123 senior compliance professionals conducted by The Risk Advisory Group in September 2017. Respondents are from a broad cross-section of businesses in terms of size and sector and from all continents. Download the Compliance Horizon Report – 2017  
About LUMA
LUMA is a flexible cloud-based platform for third party compliance management from Risk Advisory.  It has been developed to help businesses meet their growing anti-corruption regulatory requirements, enabling them to collect essential data from their counterparties with minimal effort.  For more information please visit our website – https://www.riskadvisory.com/products/luma/
About The Risk Advisory Group
The Risk Advisory Group is a leading independent global risk consultancy that helps businesses grow whilst protecting their people, their assets and their brands.

By providing facts, intelligence and analysis, The Risk Advisory Group helps its clients negotiate complex and uncertain environments to choose the right opportunities, in the right markets, with the right partners.

The company was founded in 1997, employs over 200 people and has offices in Washington DC, London, Moscow, Dubai, Beirut and Hong Kong.

Further information is available at www.riskadvisory.com