How do you measure success?
As a compliance professional, it’s likely you spend your days mitigating risks, maintaining compliance requirements, and setting the culture of compliance for your firm. But how do you (and your board or executive team) know what’s working, what isn’t, and how you stack up compared to your compliance colleagues?
During our recent webinar, Unlocking Compliance Success, COMPLY’s Chief Product Officer David Bliss led a dynamic discussion around benchmarks of success for compliance programs and what teams can do to better showcase these metrics of merit.
To begin their discussion, David polled the audience, asking the key question: How mature is your compliance performance benchmarking today?
And the result? Only 28% of respondents stated they had a comprehensive evaluation assessment process. While 12% stated they had processes in place to assess specific projects.
Compliance KPIs: Measuring the Success of Your Compliance Program
To assess your program, you must first establish the key performance indicators (KPI) which will be used to measure your overarching goals and strategies.
While every firm will need to establish their own success metrics based on their business, risk, and desired results, some baseline metrics to consider are:
- Compliance trainings: What are your average completion rates across the firm? Are there any departments or teams which have a lower or higher completion rate? Why?
- Number of compliance incidents: What, if any, violations, breaches, or complaints have been reported or discovered? How were those handled?
- Regulatory audit findings: While it is typical for regulatory audits to find some deficiency, it is critical to gauge how these deficiencies were handled and what remediations took place to ensure deficiencies were addressed moving forward.
- Compliance monitoring and testing: Periodic testing of your compliance program and its various components can be extremely helpful in determining how effective certain processes and practices are. Following the test, firms should assess any areas of weakness and how they plan to move forward.
- Employee feedback: It is critical to ascertain how employees perceive compliance initiatives, not only will this highlight areas of improvement, but it will also provide a perspective on your firm’s culture of compliance.
Once KPIs have been established, defining when and how they are measured and presented will be critical to ensuring ongoing success.
Benchmarking Your Compliance Program Against Your Peers
While it is advised that every firm consult their counsel for specific compliance concerns, leveraging peer benchmarks can be extremely helpful for:
- Understanding your own internal success or deficiency
- Ideating new strategies to implement compliance requirements
- Discovering new tools and platforms that peers have implemented to help streamline their processes
By participating in roundtable discussions and peer groups, compliance professionals can gauge how their colleagues are addressing issues and bridging gaps within their own firms, sharing best practices with their own teams, and implementing proven new techniques.
Leveraging Technology to Evaluate Your Compliance Program
While certain benchmarks and assessments may take place through manual processes, leveraging a comprehensive compliance platform provides a critical resource to enable more holistic analysis of a program’s successes.
Integrated data points, such as number of violations, completion rate of certifications/attestations, integrated broker feds, and more, allow teams to assess their 360-degree risk profile to understand what measures need to be taken to ensure compliance throughout the entire firm.
Ready to unlock your firm’s compliance excellence? Watch the on-demand recording for more tips and best practices.