Why You Should Care About Regulatory Documentation Management

Let’s start with an obvious statement - complex regulatory environments impose a heavy operational burden on their participants, often leading to convoluted processes and unnecessary friction. In other words, things don’t progress quickly and ensuring compliance while maintaining operational efficiency is challenging. One such inefficiency exists in the way regulatory documentation is managed and delivered. The process often begins with the legal and compliance departments that draft agreements, notices, disclosures and other communication. These are critical documents that ensure the institution’s compliance with relevant laws and regulations. Once ready for production, these documents are handed off to the product team, who then coordinate with engineering to ship them to the customer-facing product. This is not only time consuming but also increases the likelihood of errors.

Maintaining regulatory documents and notices is critical. Yet, this process feels disjointed, mainly because the teams designing these documents are not responsible for delivering them to the end user. Removing this control and abstracting it with another manual layer often leads to ineffective outcomes. This disconnect also creates a bottleneck that affects the agility of the product. Breaking this process down to the smallest components and removing waste in the meantime should make it easier to ship. But the lack of no-code tools to do that currently prevents that from happening.

Developers Also Want An Easier Process

What if we went back and rebuilt this process with first principles in mind: a straightforward tool that allows compliance and legal teams to manage the scheduling, delivery, and tracking of these documents directly. That feels like something developers would be on board with building. This approach streamlines the process, saving time and resources while ensuring that documents are managed and delivered more efficiently. More importantly it creates leverage where a simple integration could replace multiple layers of human involvement. It also introduces an important element of approval and control of what is presented to the end user, i.e. it will be impossible to bypass this step without the compliance team’s involvement - a useful feature in the sponsor bank / fintech relationship.

This tool is not just about improving operational efficiency though; it's about reimagining how financial institutions manage compliance and end-user communication.

• For compliance and legal teams, this approach offers unprecedented control and visibility, ensuring documents are dispatched and tracked efficiently, thereby reducing delays and enhancing regulatory adherence.

• Product teams would benefit from a significant reduction in document-related requests, freeing them to focus on core product features.

• Engineers would appreciate the automation and simplification of processes that currently demand manual intervention, allowing them to allocate their expertise to more critical tasks.

Moreover, this simplified yet effective process facilitates better compliance tracking and auditing. With a comprehensive log of every document and version lifecycle, financial institutions can easily provide clear audit trails, elevating regulatory compliance and readiness for examinations. This capability not only demonstrates an institution's commitment to compliance but also its agility and efficiency in managing digital channels. Being able to answer questions during a regulatory exam with an instant report is powerful and demonstrates that an institution has proper oversight over their programs, unlocking additional revenue opportunities through a scalable partnership model.

Keep Customers AND Regulators Happy

As the sector continues to evolve, the institutions that adopt such solutions to operational inefficiencies will likely lead the way in customer satisfaction and regulatory adherence, while highlighting the need for digital transformation in all aspects of operations as well, not just customer-facing interfaces. This is more than just a new tool; it's a step towards more nimble, responsive, and value-focused financial institutions. We are committed to reimagining the future of compliance and operational efficiency in financial institutions. If you're interested in learning more about our approach to designing compliance tools and building an observability platform for non-technical teams, please reach out.