At Alyne, we provide guidance along with simple and actionable Controls to support organisations in becoming more efficient in their regulatory compliance, through our Software as a Service platform.

Introduction

Every organisation is subject to at least some laws and many elect to align with certain standards – some of which are quite heavily regulated. Over the years this has created a quite significant overhead and paved the way for what we know today as RegTech. This means applying modern technology to increase transparency and reduce cost in dealing with regulatory compliance. At Alyne we regularly support our customers in becoming more efficient in their regulatory compliance through our Software as a Service. We have observed some common challenges and also identified success factors.

Common Challenges

  • Re-inventing the Wheel
    Too often addressing a new regulation is done on a blank piece of paper (or at least an empty spreadsheet). This ignores commonalities or even synergies between current controls and practices and the potentially new requirements. 
  • Manual Work
    Creating processes that require manual intervention or are not integrated with our systems are appealing initially, but create a significant cost of maintaining the implemented regulation. 
  • Trying to get to 100%
    Some organisations try to obtain definitive decisions on each aspect of the regulation before implementing. Especially for a new regulation these decisions might not be available. We recommend making assumptions and implementing what can be implemented, documenting the assumptions and revising if necessary.

Success Factors

  • Form Your Own Opinion
    Often the perfect legal opinion will not help you implement a certain requirement in practice. Form your own opinion, document the decision approach and proceed with implementation to de-risk your regulatory compliance.  
  • Identify Patterns
    Find patterns in your regulatory requirements and use them to your advantage. Leverage synergies by addressing multiple requirements through one control and maintain a mapping. 
  • Encourage Interaction
    Involve various stakeholders interactively to avoid serial sign off processes that can drag out decisions. As a bonus you can document the interaction to demonstrate active engagement of the organisation towards auditors.