Recently, Global Compliance News compliance benchmark for the year 2017 states that antibribery and corruption risks remain high. While 77% of the companies have said that they have some sort of risk assessment mechanism, the key variables considered by companies while addressing compliances is impact and likelihood of failure in compliance. Companies have shown a trend of learning from their compliance failures and response to government enforcement.

Third party related compliances remain the single highest worry for companies, ahead of even the regulatory environment. Lack of disclosures by third parties on their regulatory non-compliance has only added to the risks due to a lack of proper monitoring and enforcement.

What’s going to happen and how predictive we get determines how best we can help our clients tide over their risks. From facing challenges in mapping compliances through tabulations back in the day to choosing the appropriate software in the market to help manage compliance, the paradigm shift in compliance management has been mind boggling.

In bygone times, the biggest nuisance value in compliance to organisations that were physically spread out was getting a handle on labour law compliances. State regulations and central laws, decentralized compliance management structure, failure in communications were the three important criteria. Added to that were the myriad laws, some of them archaic to the point of being irrelevant that left enterprises at the mercy of the regulator. We found solutions. From regular audits by third parties to automated tools to track failure in compliance.

Over a period of time the challenges changed as it became more complex while the costs started to rise exponentially. Compliance was considered a cost centre by companies, until we gave a new perspective. We made compliance and governance as parameters to measure the brand image of the company. That made sense. That was worth investing. Compliance management now had a tangible business result tagged to it.

Challenges still remained as companies realized they needed more than software tools to pull them through the everchanging world of compliance management. They needed offline support. A software tool is only as good as the content that supports it. Additionally, enterprises realised that they now needed to tend to global compliance requirements, not just Indian. Thus, a software tool to monitor compliance also necessitated sufficient subject matter expertise from the service provider.

As transparency becomes the buzzword and compliance is now as much a brand image as corporate social responsibility. It is not enough if you do right business, it is a must that you do right business, right.

Being right is not about just predictive business, it is also about predictive compliance. Trends show that the business lines must take responsibility for compliance.