5 Ways RPA Enables Accurate & Insightful Compliance in 2024

Compliance efforts are necessary practices to ensure that a business is keeping up with internal and external regulations and policies, which helps businesses detect violations and fraud, and avoid fines and lawsuits. However, according to Deloitte, accomplishing effective compliance is a challenging process due to cost, quality, and consistency of monitoring and assurance, as well as difficulty of coordination between different business departments.

In this article, we explore the challenges in compliance, how automation can tackle them, and recommendations to ensure accurate and insightful compliance functions.

1. Eliminate unauthorized access to privileged data

Different industries leverage customers’ personal data or third-party data (e.g. IoT data) to make data-driven decisions. Any error in processing and storing such data may compromise privileged data and expose it to non-authorized individuals, thus, violating data privacy regulations and policies. And under the EU GDPR, authorities can fine organizations that violate data privacy regulations up to 4% of their worldwide turnover for the preceding financial year.

Recommendation

RPA bots can replicate data manipulation processes such as entry, transfer, and storage, without human intervention. Leveraging bots to automate data processes will:

• Reduce the chance of data errors
• Eliminate unauthorized access to privileged data
• Create an audit trail to review and monitor user activity

2. Verify process logs against regulations and policies

According to Deloitte, 17% of businesses do not conduct regular risk assessment to identify compliance risks, exposing the organization to reputational risks. The report reveals that lack of risk assessment is due to the leaders’ initial focus being on developing compliance capabilities.

Recommendation

Deploy RPA for monitoring and assessment of compliance-related tasks. Bots can verify process logs against regulation and policy documents to detect missing steps and non-compliant processes, and notify auditors of recurring non-compliant processes.

3. Automate low value regulatory reporting tasks

According to Deloitte, only 24% of the time is spent on analyzing reports and making data-driven decisions, The remaining 76% of the report delivery time is spent on low value adding tasks, such as generating the reports according to templates and ensuring quality data.

Recommendation

Leverage RPA bots for generating regulatory reports from business data in designated time of the month or year. RPA bots can be programmed to extract data from business datasets, verify that the data matches original sources (e.g. finance reports, invoices, CRM data), and generate compliance reports and send them to relevant employees for verification. Additionally, bots can identify mismatches in data and notify users of data errors and duplicates to ensure better risk assessment.

4. Keep up to date with regulatory requirements

In a KPMG survey, 60% of organization leaders reported that they do not use automation for regulatory requirements and laws (e.g. Dodd-Frank Act, HIPAA, FISMA) which are frequently modified by policy makers. Updating internal policies to reflect external policy modifications is a repetitive and time consuming task.

Recommendation

Rely on RPA bots to scrape policy makers’ websites, extract news about regulations, laws, or rules, and update regulation data in the organization’s internal regulation databases. Bots can also send emails to notify relevant employees about novel or modified regulations so they can update their policies accordingly.

5. Minimize errors in onboarding and due diligence

Third-party onboarding and due diligence is done when an organization wants to outsource specific tasks to third parties, which may include access to privileged data. This is a repetitive time consuming process (15,000 hours a year) of third-party data entry, verification against existing legal records and documents, and risk score calculation and assignment. However, failure to assess the profiles and risks of third parties can have significant impact on business data; 74% of organizations that faced data breaches said it was a result of providing too much privileged access to third parties.

Recommendation

Leverage bots to complete due diligence processes to reduce human errors, increase speed of onboarding completion, and generate a comprehensive audit trail for later compliance analysis. Bots can also be programmed to route third parties to employees if they came out with a risk score higher than a selected threshold.

For more on compliance technology

To explore different technologies that your business can leverage for compliance automation, read our in-depth articles:

• AI Audit: Guide to faster & more accurate audits
• Anti Money Laundering Algorithms: Tackling AML with AI
• KYC Automation: 5 Technologies for Better Transparency

For a detailed overview of how RPA works and how it can help you transform your business, download our comprehensive whitepaper on the topic:

If you want to leverage RPA and other automation solutions in your business digital transformation, check our data-driven lists of:

• RPA vendors
• Automation hub
• Risk, Governance, and Compliance hub

And let us help you choose the right tool for your business:

This article was drafted by former AIMultiple industry analyst Alamira Jouman Hajjar.