The Compliance 360 online solution reduces the overhead and risks of regulatory compliance and governance, enabling increased focus on the core business of providing quality services and creating shareholder value. With over 100,000 active users, Compliance 360 is one of the most widely used compliance, risk and governance solutions today. Key industry requirements addressed by Compliance 360 include:

Financial Service organizations face the challenge of multiple federal regulations as well as unique, varying regulations among the 50 states, and self-governing organization requirements. As a result of this complex regulatory environment, many financial services organizations today continue to address regulatory compliance in a highly reactive mode. Without the right tools in place, executives are often unaware of compliance problems until they are faced with a negative event, such as a data breach, whistle blower allegation or a consent decree. The obvious risks include penalties, fines, litigation and potential negative media coverage.

How can Compliance 360 help?

With Compliance 360, you can organize all relevant statutes and regulations and link them to the corresponding policies, procedures, surveys and remediation plans to construct your evidence of compliance. With our content partners LexisNexis, Westlaw and others, we you keep abreast of newly proposed laws and regulations as well as newly enacted laws. The system helps you manage all facets of compliance and audit management within the framework of your overall corporate governance and risk management initiatives. The collaborative tools from Compliance 360 enable proactive demonstration of corporate governance and risk management initiatives by automating processes associated with assessing and monitoring risk, managing the risk response strategy, linking risk management data to compliance activities and providing a comprehensive view of all risk-related activities through an executive dashboard. Finance, audit and risk management professionals have the ability to organize and manage projects across the organization, document audit tasks and audit findings, track issues, manage remediation tasks, and record resulting actions.

In light of today’s economic condition, regulatory agencies are becoming more aggressive as they pursue inspections of financial services institutions. Federal agencies are hiring more inspectors and implementing tougher inspection criteria. It is imperative that financial services organizations be able to respond quickly and effectively to prove compliance with all applicable regulations and standards, thus reducing the risk of penalty and potential damage to the brand.

How can Compliance 360 help?

Using Compliance 360, you can organize all applicable regulations, assess your organization’s compliance with those standards and link all evidence of compliance to each regulation. You can also import the inspection standards into Compliance 360 allowing your organization to ensure that each of the aspects that will be covered during the inspection have been accounted for.

All of the data can be organized by line of business or individual entity and assessment results can be rolled up using the Compliance 360 integrated reporting tool to provide an organization- wide view of regulatory compliance. Finally, because Compliance 360 is delivered as an online solution, financial services organizations can deliver the data to regulatory agencies by allowing regulators to access a secure, restricted view of the information, right from their computers.

One of the most effective ways that any organization can protect itself from a negative event is to establish a strong internal audit process. An independent internal audit group can not only assist management as they identify potential trouble-spots within the organization but can also allow regulators to feel confident that the organization is dedicated to identifying and fixing issues proactively, instead of hoping they “don’t get caught.”

How can Compliance 360 help?

Compliance 360 allows organizations to establish a single repository of information related to audits and audit work papers. You can use Compliance 360 to track all of the tasks associated with audits, identify gaps, manage remediation efforts and link all of the data required to support audit findings. Learn More

In light of increasing regulatory scrutiny, the risk of fraud, waste and abuse allegations has increased significantly. The financial incentives for whistle-blowers (qui tam witnesses) can create a very compelling motive and necessitates the establishment of preventative and response measures. Improving the management and overall outcomes of fraud, waste and abuse claims now harbors a significant financial advantage for most organizations.

How can Compliance 360 help?

With the Incident Management capabilities of Compliance 360, you can centrally manage the investigation of all types of fraud, waste and abuse claims. All information compiled for each investigation is centrally stored in Compliance 360. The investigative process is streamlined by dynamically routing the incident to the appropriate person based on the type of incident and the stage of the investigation. Additionally the Incident Management system provides a complete audit trail of actions and signoffs for accountability.

Sensitive investigation data is secured for each business unit, with secure, central access provided to corporate Regulatory Compliance individuals for identifying issues that may be broader in nature, impacting multiple business units. This capability helps you leverage the power of your entire organization while selectively promoting best practices among various business units as desired.

Corrective Action Plans and Cease and Desist requirements can be very complex, creating significant risk and cost burdens for organizations of any size. The format of corrective action plans can also vary widely from state to state creating challenges for organizations seeking to standardize their operations as much as possible.

How can Compliance 360 help?

Assigning, assessing and tracking the requirements of a corrective action plan manually is virtually impractical and simply adds to the risk of missed requirements. With Compliance 360, you can centrally manage corrective action plans. To manage the internal process of implementing the corrective action plan, you can sort reports by responsible parties and give each individual access to the relevant sections. Responses to regulatory inquiries can be provided immediately and confidently with thorough, accurate information tracked within Compliance 360 to reduce the risk of additional sanctions and speed the corrective action process to a rapid conclusion.

Identity theft become a substantial risk to the brand of many organizations and Regulators are increasing their focus on proactive protection of consumer and client data. On May 1, 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will begin enforcing the Identity Theft Red Flags regulations that went into effect in November of 2008. Credit-issuing organizations must establish policies and procedures to ensure that client information is secure. They must also be able prove that these policies and procedures are communicated to, and practiced by, all employees and ultimately demonstrate that the policies and procedures are effective for preventing identity theft.

How can Compliance 360 help?

Using Compliance 360, you can store and disseminate Identity Theft Red Flag policies and procedures to your entire organization, track training and policy acknowledgements, assess compliance with those policies and procedures, validate that third party vendors are following the identity theft policies and procedures and identify potential issues and track remediation efforts for any gaps in compliance that have been identified. Compliance 360 provides a central repository for storing the evidence in support of your Red Flags program, and the system also allows you to automate the management of all activities related to assessing the effectiveness of your Red Flags program.

The FDIC and other regulatory examiners are now very focused on compliance programs related to third-party service providers (TSPs). Today many financial services organizations are not adequately overseeing their third-party service providers (TSPs) and verifying their compliance with regulations such as those tied to identify theft red flags. Although your TSPs may only be held accountable indirectly, you are ultimately responsible for compliance gaps that may exist within your TSPs. Your compliance programs must now be in place and you must be able to demonstrate their effectiveness. Establishing and communicating policies is not enough. You must be able to show that the policies are effectively practiced by your TSPs.

How can Compliance 360 help?

Using Policy Management capabilities of Compliance 360, you can store, distribute and manage your vendor management policies and procedures. With Contracts Management and integrated workflow, you can automate collaboration, establish paths for approval routes and keep everyone on track for timely revisions, reviews and renewals. You can also automate the monitoring of contracts to ensure adherence and maintain an audit trail of all contract revisions. Through the Surveys capability, you can collect attestations of compliance to specific policies and regulations with your third-party contractors and vendors, just as you would with your employees. The system is also used to identify compliance gaps and conflicts of interest, as well as manage the remediation process. Finally, Compliance 360 allows you to perform detailed assessments of your vendor management program to ensure it is meeting both internal and regulatory goals and ensure that you have substantial evidence of a strong 3rd-party compliance program to support regulatory audits and inspections.

All publicly traded organizations are required to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act in the U.S. and a growing number of privately held organizations are electing to comply with the “best practices” of Sarbanes-Oxley for a variety of reasons such as maintaining adequate bond ratings.

How can Compliance 360 help?

Complex and cumbersome spreadsheets do not provide the capabilities needed to manage the data for governance, risk and compliance initiatives. Compliance 360’s SOX solution is an integrated part of the single, comprehensive compliance platform. With this solution, you can manage internal controls for financial reporting while integrating all aspects of SOX compliance, such as controls monitoring and testing, documentation, risk evaluation and measurement and monitoring with your enterprise governance, risk and compliance strategy.

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To learn how leading financial Services organizations are using Compliance 360 to minimize their compliance overhead and risks, and how you can be do the same, contact us today.