In the everchanging and complex compliance landscape, meeting regulatory compliances can be challenging, labor-intensive, and error-prone when done manually. Failing to meet compliances can have significant cost and operational impacts. Furthermore, compliance becomes increasingly sophisticated as time goes on, making it more difficult and costly for firms to comply. Robotic process automation (RPA) can automate this process to improve compliance. RPA involves the use of innovative technology to simplify high-volume, repetitive tasks and improve workflow. By utilizing key technology apps like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, business operations can be automated and streamlined to deliver a better customer experience. Implementation of RPA can help businesses make intelligent, data-driven decisions related to asset management, customer support and supplier management. This also ensures maximum compliance with the laws and regulations while reducing errors/mistakes. Experienced business process outsourcing companies can ensure the accuracy of business processes and data.
What Compliance Processes Are Relevant to RPA?
Generally, the term compliance refers to conforming to rules, policies, and regulations to maintain data integrity, data security, and safeguard the privacy of employees and customers. Compliance issues vary across departments and industries. RPA helps organizations better navigate the complexities of achieving and maintaining compliance in the rapidly evolving regulatory landscape. The technology works by automating repetitive tasks such as compiling testing results or alerting employees that a certain remediation step needs attention.
In simple terms, any specific procedure that is very repetitive can be a prospect for RPA automation. Data entry and data validation are two examples wherein compliance processes become relevant. However, bots may also be used for report production and dissemination, emailing customers, sending invoices, administering payroll, organizing appointments, and much more. In addition, there are various other tasks in internal compliance where RPA technology can be effectively utilized –
- RPA activities can be built to gather data and input information into a risk assessment tool that further evaluates the audit. With bots, data collection and assessment can run indefinitely. The end result is ongoing risk assessment and audit planning. The output could be programmed to make a recommendation and be configured to suggest a compliance schedule based on rules such as priority scheduling and skill-based assignments.
- Automated testing can be delivered to the control owners for the most basic checks. The ultimate goal of testing is to eliminate audits from the equation. For instance, the tasks of Robotic Process Automation may be held by the company, and the bots would then be put to the test as a control.
- Reporting, as well as sending reminders for corrective action updates can be coded for automation and automatic distribution.
How RPA Supports Internal Compliance – Key Areas
Robotic process automation is particularly beneficial to internal compliance teams that constantly coordinate with the company and external auditors. With automation technology, internal compliance can shift its attention from supporting external compliance operations like evidence collection, sample gathering to operational reviews with the business. Here discussed are some key areas wherein RPA can support internal compliance –
- Analytical Data Collection and Cleansing – With RPA, data can be easily generated and standardized for custom analytics as well as pull data for internal and external auditors, including automation checks for field completeness, duplicates, and validity. Therefore, internal compliance team will no longer have to spend time coordinating and acquiring data.
- Risk Evaluation – RPA bots can help in automating the data collection and classification stages of the annual risk assessment process. This can be accomplished by obtaining early input from participants and identifying key trends. This in turn enables in-person discussions to focus on trend analysis and deep dive into the organization’s concerns.
- Controls Automation – RPA bots can help control testing, particularly in standardized sections where tickets and fields are utilized routinely. In such cases, internal audits are no longer necessary to complete those routine checkmarks.
- Project Management Office (PMO) – RPA can help in a number of PMO areas for internal audit including –
- Identifying open items, sending follow-up emails, and keeping track of status
- Monitoring progress in relation to a project plan or an annual audit plan (can use RPA to monitor KPIs in the process)
- Reporting automation – Report templates, audit committee slides
- Population Control – Bots can efficiently process data populations during sampling and initial evidence gathering for standard evidence for controls. This is very useful when dealing with big populations that require a lot of processing time, such as examining hundreds of statement papers.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Use Cases for Compliance
The automation technologies utilized by RPA tools help replicate back-office workflows such as data extraction, data entry, form fills and sharing files. The technology employs user interface (UI) interactions and APIs to execute repetitive tasks, thus freeing human resources to use their time in a more productive way. Furthermore, workflow automation for compliance has the added benefit of streamlining and enhancing parts of the compliance process such as data analysis, risk assessment, document gathering, and more. Below discussed are some of the specific use cases of RPA adoption across organizations –
- Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Alerts – The majority of the processes for researching and addressing anti-money laundering warnings are manual or semi-automated, making RPA a viable option.
- Internal and External Reporting – The process of attaining data and preparing internal and external regulatory reports is largely manual in many business areas. For instance, in banks, daily liquidity coverage and delinquency reports are frequently created manually and this can be automated by using RPA.
- Onboarding of KYC – Connecting diverse data from numerous internal and external sources during the know-your-customer onboarding process is a challenging process. RPA has the potential to be useful in this domain as well. RPA bots, for instance, can collect and retrieve data from regulatory organizations as well as assist in the onboarding process. In addition, RPA has been used by several banks in the KYC process, such as document gathering and validation.
- Limit Management – Risk officers assess and close limit breaches or violations as part of the limit management process. As the resolution entails manual data assimilation from several sources and manual analysis to arrive at judgments, cognitive RPA solutions can assist in the limit management process by utilizing RPA for data assimilation and machine-learning approaches to aid decision-making.
- Reconciliation – Reconciliations happen at many levels in business areas, and they are also a big part of internal and external management reporting. However, most of the reconciliation operations, particularly in data gathering and preparation, are manual in nature and might benefit from RPA.
- Remediation of Mortgages – Mortgage lending, in particular, accounts for a significant portion of business revenue. In these remediation scenarios, both business organizations and regulators want to guarantee that client interaction are responsibly managed. Now business practices are using the interest rate, calculating fees for overcharging/deductions for late payments or deductions for equated monthly installments (EMI), or handling customer complaints require lots of hard work and precision.
Automation streamlines business processes, reduces the chance of human error in a business process, and allows employees to focus on core strategic work that help business to prosper. RPA help automate all the business processes while maintaining precision. Also, due to the enormous data volume, completing all of the core business tasks, may take a significant amount of time and resources. RPA is one of several technologies, along with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), that can all work together to create intelligent automation of rules-based, repetitive tasks. Given the demands of modern corporate compliance, embracing such technologies can help organizations maintain their compliance programs, and create long-term sustainability and scalability of an organization. A robotic process automation company can help organizations automate time-consuming labor-intensive tasks using smart technology, and improve the efficiency of the tasks and their workforce.
