What is Compliance?
As businesses grow they experience increasing levels of compliance requirements and scrutiny. Compliance means ensuring a business is operating within all the various laws, policies and directives relevant to the activities it undertakes. Failure to comply can result in fines, legal proceedings, restrictions on applying for tenders or governments programs, increased difficulty securing finance or insurance, and weakened brand reputation.
Whilst compliance is often externally imposed, many organisations will also add their own internal compliance practices. This may be to protect trade secrets or reduce unique risks. These compliance initiatives often relate to practices and processes and technology can play an uncompromisable role in monitoring adherence to these key activities.
Externally imposed compliance requirements can be both general in nature, or specific to an industry. When it comes to technology, most external compliance requirements focus on where data is stored, the robustness of security measures in place, what records are kept, how long they must be stored for and how confidential or private information is handled.
As developed economies mature, they show a trend of increasing regulation and compliance burden placed on companies. Because technology grows at a faster rate than governments can legislate, many compliance measures also need to be retrofitted over existing systems presenting unique complexities. Good compliance is therefore adaptive and responsive to its evolving context.
Inside Tips
- Be proactive about staying up to date with your compliance obligations; ignorance is often not an excuse.
- Consider how you can create a culture of compliance within your organisation.
- Use external support and advice to navigate compliance and help reduce your liability.
- Consider insurance as a safety net to protect your business from possible mistakes or oversights.
- Ensure staff understand their individual obligations as well as corresponding businesses obligations and processes in place.
- Ensure staff understand the reasoning behind processes and policies and steps to take if the rules are breached - such as who to contact.
- Implement whistleblower policies to help staff raise breaches quickly.
- Ensure staff are held accountable to both internal policies and legal guidelines.
Benefits from doing this well
- Avoid legal risks, costs and other damages that can arise from being uncompliant.
- Protect brand reputation and increase trust with staff, clients and shareholders by having appropriate plans and policies in place.
- Become eligible for new opportunities by meeting certain compliance standards or certifications.
Our Approach
Our broad experience across a number of high regulation sectors positions us well to offer strong compliance advice and solutions.
Proactively, our teams work hard to ensure your IT systems are always tailored to compliance requirements specific to your geographic location, industry and other special considerations.
Reactively, we can help various departments within your business navigate any compliance breaches using a staged approach. This means we implement quick, short-term fixes whilst working towards more substantial and sustainable long-term solutions.
To ensure a high degree of fidelity, we can also run tests and simulations on our compliance solutions in various domains.
