Enhance compliance efficiency and rigor in the age of COVID-19

By Brent Rudewick, Director of Product Management

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The financial services industry is one of the most heavily regulated in the world, and maintaining regulatory compliance is among the top priorities for organisations in this sector—ensuring compliance requires time and input from many departments and individuals throughout the business. 

Managing compliance processes takes many forms, from controlling and documenting asset approvals, to reviewing content and communications for accuracy and relevance, to maintaining accessible and up-to-date records for audit purposes. For creative and marketing teams in this sector, keeping track of approvals, managing version control, and maintaining records can take up huge amounts of time that could be more productively spent on high-value creative work. 

In the age of COVID-19, the importance of compliance has not diminished, but the difficulty of ensuring consistency in the processes and approvals that are critical to compliance has increased significantly. Managing these sometimes lengthy and laborious processes, often across multiple IT platforms, has become more challenging now that workforces are widely dispersed and working remotely. 

Manage approvals to mitigate risk. 

For most financial services businesses, approving marketing assets and other external content in a compliant way requires matching the content to the right approval process and approvers. Knowledge about which approval process aligns to which content is typically held at an institutional level and is shared peer-to-peer, face-to-face, and on an as-needed basis. Now that workers are no longer working together in -person, many businesses have lost the ability to scale their institutional knowledge. The only way to ensure consistency in this new work environment is through technology.  

Enterprise work management solutions, like Workfront, provide a centralised platform that can be used by all departments within an organisation to manage workflows and mitigate compliance risk in a coordinated and efficient manner. It gives everyone the same view of current tasks and progress against them, helps eliminate duplication of effort, and provides everyone with a clear view of the status of individual projects. 

Enabling teams within large financial services organisations to manage regulatory approval processes more easily is a game-changing capability, allowing resources and skills to be allocated to optimum effect so that everyone can devote more time to their core work. 

Increase agility and speed to market. 

Enterprise work management technology allows financial services businesses to get their messages out to the market more quickly by allowing their teams to work faster and better. It gives businesses the agility to get timely messages out to customers in response to market changes—which are happening more frequently than ever in the COVID-19 era—without fear of compromising regulatory compliance or risk management. 

Enterprise work management gives everyone in the organisation the visibility they need to ensure the right people are doing the right work at the right time. At the same time, everyone can see how their work fits into the bigger picture, ensuring they work in accordance with the brand vision and business strategy. 

Integrate and automate to enable compliance. 

Another challenge is ensuring that assets, once approved in the correct way, are archived properly. If the archiving process for maintaining these records isn't automated, the records will probably be stored on people’s hard drives—which could come back to haunt businesses in the near future. If companies aren't using technology to create a central database for all records, what happens in Q4 2020 if a regulatory body asks to see everything that was approved during Q2, when the entire workforce was working remotely? It could be a real challenge for businesses to produce the information required by auditors. 

Financial services businesses that leverage enterprise work management solutions, like Workfront, which integrates with content management solutions, like Adobe, can connect every facet of work flowing through the enterprise so they can meet the fine line details (and there are many) of regulatory and compliance pressures, creating accountability and traceability along the way. 

Workfront enables the appropriate approval processes to take place and to be managed efficiently, and then links all the associated metadata to assets in Adobe. Workfront and Adobe together ensure that stakeholders have easy access to the information they need, and that all content remains up-to-date and compliant from a brand and regulatory perspective. And because existing content is easily located via metadata tags in Adobe, it can be reused in campaigns versus creating content from scratch, improving speed to market and saving money and time in delivering relevant, timely content to customers. 

Companies in this heavily regulated sector must be able to prove that their content is current—Workfront enables this verification for auditors. 

One platform for compliance simplicity and efficiency.

While many within financial services may think they already have too many IT tools to deal with, enterprise work management offers a unifying solution that brings all relevant data and resources from disparate systems together into a single, easily accessible central platform. 

Workfront introduces reliable auditing capabilities and secure approval processes that allows organisations to maintain their business integrity and continuity in these challenging times. The platform is designed to provide the security and scalability required by the sector, while enabling regulatory compliance, auditability of work, and clear visibility across the dispersed organisation. Workfront helps businesses in this sector move toward strategic work that involves cross-team collaboration driven by company goals and outcomes. 

Prudential Financial—American Fortune Global 500 and Fortune 500 company—is thriving in the face of relentless regulatory and compliance pressures with enterprise work management. Join us at our Leap 2020 Virtual Conference on June 24th to hear from Lauren Day, Prudential's Chief Communications Officer, about how they're using Workfront to stay focused on the future of work in a time of global uncertainty.