REGULATORY COMPLIANCES ARE THE BOTTOM LINE OF ALL SERVICES AND ANY STAFF SHORTAGE IS A SEEN AS “HULLA BULLA” !!!!
Karma Management Global Consulting Solutions Pvt. Ltd. One of the top 5 consultancy firms, established in the year 2004, with headquarters in the business district of Santacruz East, Mumbai, India, and full-scale operation in all the States, having about 200 direct and indirect staff on its roll, is a leading service provider for payroll and payroll compliances, outsourcing, facility services, HR services, Training & Development, Recruitment & Talent Acquisition, Legal and Para legal services, Disputes and Litigation Handling, Inspection Management and Liaisoning, Advisory Services, Social, Environment and Vendor Audits, Regulatory compliances ad Governance.
Compliance with labour and employment laws has become one of the most important issues that many establishments in India have to deal with. Many employment disputes result in litigation. Karma is an Indian HR, Payroll, and Compliance firm advising clients worldwide on local, regional and global regulatory compliances in relation to their business goals, business strategies, and resolving disputes.
It gives valuable suggestions and advice to Corporates, Investors, Institutions, Contractors, Establishments, Industries, SMEs, etc. on the need for lowering employment risk across all levels and adhering to the laws of the land. It has a lot of expertise on employment-related compliance issues, as well as day-to-day support for the human resource department and in-house counsels. Karma Management is also into employment agreements and policies, structuring of compensation and benefits, employment aspects of merger and takeover, etc.
Karma’s force, strength, and reach have brought tremendous change over from its earlier image of being a consultancy firm in the period of 2000, to now embarking on setting practices abroad in highly regulated markets and competing in the global arena.
With India overtaking the UK to emerge as the fifth largest economy in the world and setting to become the third largest by2029, Karma Global is all poised for long-term value in terms of clients outreach and giving state-of-the-art technology and excellent services to global clients better than ever before,
Let Us Examine The Concerns Of The Financial Services Firms When It Comes To Upholding Regulatory Compliances!
The financial crisis of yesteryears resulted in huge Governance and Regulatory changes for the financial services industry. Banks, Financial Institutions, Insurance companies, brokerage firms, and other businesses engaged in financial activities were confronted with an ever-changing regulatory landscape full of requirements that perhaps are more complex than most other commercial requirements and tenders.
Regulatory compliance is not only complicated in nature but costly when factoring in the fines, and imprisonment threats and can even damage your brand reputation that might suffer when failing to abide by the same.
Complications aside, it seems finance professionals are in full dedication to tackling the challenge of compliances head on but the big load coupled with manpower shortages is causing unrestrained disorder.
According to Accenture’s Compliance Risk Study which surveyed 150 compliance officers at organizations around the world, respondents plan to up their investment in compliance management to 89 percent over the next two years. And 66 percent of respondents said they now report directly to their CEO or Board of Directors, suggesting the heightened importance of compliance and perhaps a desire to be more strategic in their approach.
To give you some insights into the regulatory issues plaguing the financial services industry, we have enumerated below some of the biggest compliance challenges in the financial services realm.
1. Keeping Pace with Consumer Laws
Consumer laws have traditionally been a monumental challenge for financial institutions. In many cases, the challenge is both a matter of having a number of different laws to satisfy and simply trying to keep up with all the changes.
2. Combating Cyber Attacks
The sensitivity and potential value of the data in their possession make financial institutions a prime target of cyber attacks. Whether it’s ransomware or inside exploits, these attacks can hinder your ability to maintain compliance and cripple your business in the process. However, many firms have struggled with implementing security programs and policies that effectively keep threats at bay and should carry out comprehensive risk assessment planning and strategies that protect their digital assets as well as improve their ability to respond to attacks.
3. Safeguarding Sensitive Data
For businesses in the financial sector, cybersecurity isn’t just a matter of neutralizing threats; it’s a matter of data privacy. These companies are naturally responsible for a wealth of financial and personally identifiable information that requires special handling.
4. The Fintech Factor
There’s no denying that technology has been hugely influential in improving speed, performance, and reliability across multiple industries. On the other hand, it can make the already complex task of compliance even more challenging. Often referred to as “fintech,” financial technology such as mobile e-commerce, digital currencies, and web-based business, in general, has introduced even greater risk. When it comes to technology, financial institutions must master the ultimate balancing act by juggling risk management, security, consumer protection, and profitability.
5. Controlling Compliance Costs
Tackling compliance requires real monetary investment, and the costs can get rather outrageous. The combination of regulators, investors, customers, and other stakeholders has financial institutions feeling the pressure to optimize their infrastructures in ways that address the ever-growing scrutiny of compliance. These challenges will surely become even more complex as both technology and the regulatory landscape continues to evolve.
Regulatory Compliance software becomes critical for Banks and other Financial Services: Let us see why?
A number of banks have breached regulatory compliance in the past and are now on the radar of financial regulators. Fines, reputational damage, and career breaks are just some of the consequences.
Financial Crime on the Rise – Partially Fuelled by COVID-19
Banks and regulators fighting financial crime face an uphill battle – a situation COVID-19 has compounded. The pandemic has brought with it soaring levels of fraud, money laundering, and terrorist financing as cybercriminals seek to exploit heightened security risks. And throughout, banks have also had to face the operational challenges of limited services, staff shortages, and suspension of conventional servicing channels like branches.
Banks need to Automate Regulatory Compliance
Regulators insisting on ever-greater transparency means financial institutions have to generate and manage increasingly vast amounts of data. And compiling, analyzing, and computing it all is only feasible with various technology systems and applications.
Laser Focus on Regulatory Compliance
As regulatory demands and cost pressures intensify, regulatory compliance obligations are straining banks to the limit. The upshot is significant compliance risk and the looming threat of regulatory fines.
Banks Must Embrace Regulatory Compliance Software
Subsequent to global regulatory reforms, a ceaseless flood of new laws and regulations has left them little choice and this has urgently called for the need to focus on regulatory compliance rather than innovation.
The answer lies in digitalization. Financial firms need a sustainable, scalable, and cost-effective solution to analyze enormous amounts of data more efficiently, identify suspicious activity more easily, and improve and accelerate risk detection and remediation.
Regulatory Compliance Software: Blazing a Trail as a Beacon of Hope
Regulatory Compliance software uses cutting-edge technology like machine learning to help financial firms solve regulatory and compliance issues swiftly and at a larger scale. Combining data with expert insights helps regulatory compliance software detect complex cases of money laundering and terrorist financing faster and more effectively than ever before.
Machine Learning Represents the Brains of Regulatory Compliance Software
Given increasingly complex threats and an avalanche of data to analyze current compliance processes, current processes are no longer fit and fall short when it comes to detecting risk and fraudulent activity.
These problems and issues can be overcome with AI-powered, tailored, and automated powered and risk management systems. New regulatory compliance software allows banks to analyze huge volumes of data from numerous sources at exceptional speed – automatically flagging security risks or suspected illegality. Combining data with expert insights from compliance officers helps machine learning software to detect complex cases of money laundering and terrorist financing swiftly and accurately.
Staff shortages abounding on account of the competitive labour market and budget
From some of the insights gathered, it is understood that the majority of firms are expecting regulatory activity to increase manifold – and therefore their workloads to increase proportionately next year, however, most of the respondents (61%) think their teams will stay the same size. Just over a third (35%) said they expect the size of their compliance teams to grow, with 4% predicting a decrease. In the UK, 65% of firms said they expect compliance teams to stay the same size.
From the feedback gathered, it has been revealed that the main reason why firms do not expect team sizes to increase significantly may be the increased cost of senior compliance staff. Two-thirds (67%) of firms said they expect the cost of senior compliance officers to increase due to the competitive labour market and skills shortages.
The responses also shed light on the Budgetary constraints as another source of pressure amongst fulfillment of compliance requirements. Only 12% of firms said they expect budgets to increase significantly in the next year, with 50% saying they expect them to rise slightly. Given the increased scope of regulatory activity, this suggests that firms expect to find themselves under greater pressure to deliver more work without a commensurate increase in resources.
Regulatory requirements for compliance professionals to be held accountable for their actions mean they expect to face an extra burden of responsibility. 45% of firms said they expect the personal liability of compliance professionals to increase in the next year. These kinds of risks in moving and shaping the future of is causing unprecedented uproar in the market causing even further tightness in labour market
“Some businesses are planning to deal with this excess workload by outsourcing more regulatory work and deploying more technology.”
Conclusion
Regulatory compliance software slashes the time required for complex analyses and checks. In fact, it’s a game-changer – allowing huge productivity and efficiency gains, cutting costs, and delivering better and more accurate data results. The long-sought-after solution to scale and adapt to the modern threat and regulatory landscapes is now a reality.
With surging criminal activities, shortages of skilled workers, cost pressures, and new laws and regulations, the pressure on compliance departments of financial services firms has never been greater. Companies are desperate to avoid reputational risk or coming onto the radar of Financial, Legal, and Governance Regulators. One solution is to use regulatory compliance software that relies on machine learning as an AI component.
Its advantages include the scope to analyze complex data in bulk efficiently, detect risks early and boost agility. Intelligent digitalization paves the way to implement complex regulatory requirements as well as help mitigate risks and keep costs under control. All of which means key personnel can focus on the essentials. When selecting the right regulatory compliance software and systems supplier, banks should ensure they have in-depth knowledge of regulatory compliance in banks. Everything points to this future-proofing approach as the best way to handle fresh challenges going forward.
Karma Management Global Tech Firm, which went into rapid digitalization in the year 2020 onwards, witnessed a kind of revolution in the working of their in-house processes and systems with a flurry of software development activities catching on to harness high-tech tools in the operational part of the services.
Thus, this gave rise to high tech development of highly versatile systems like WeChecked for vendor audits”, “WeProcess for Compliances”, “Fulcrum for automated workflow processes”, “BumbleBee for seamless client interactions and analytics” and “HRMS My Payroll Buddy for payroll with GPS.”
It has been our proud moment to say that in this industry, we are today in the top 5 holding a market share of over 30% and our plans are to cross over to 50% in the next two years, with the kind of technological tools that we have developed in-house and already functional with hundred percent seamless operations with accurate features and the chatbot to answer all queries instantly,.
Karma is approachable on the global front with offices in Canada, UK, USA, UAE, Far East, and Asia with expert staff on its rolls at the local, regional and international levels and global financial sector clients can count on our excellent services and get in touch with us for real-time customer experience.
Proprietory blog of Karma Global Tech Management Firm
This blog has been collated and compiled by the internal staff of Karma with the knowledge and expertise that they possess, for its monthly newsletter Issue 04 of October 2022 in case of specific or general information or compliance updates for that matter, kindly reach out to the team by sharing your email IDs.
Marketing Team – Kush@karmamgmt.com / yashika@karmamgmt.com