Manage Risk With Regtech

Technology can provide a variety of features associated with efficient, comprehensive and cost-effective compliance, says Rebecca Herold, co-founder/president of SIMBUS360, Des Moines, Iowa:

• support from compliance experts in the form of prewritten policies and procedures that each credit union can customize and adapt for its operations;
• online access to compliant process and procedure guides with formal processes for employees to review and attest to their understanding;
• logins to track those accessing required procedures, forms and disclosures;
• online training modules to push out regulatory learning content and activities, assignments, quizzes and results for employees to monitor their progress and for managers to evaluate training results at an individual and group level;
• automation of reminders and compliance tools;
• automation of risk assessments to reduce time requirements and costs and to ensure consistent reviews;
• employee oversight and inventories of types of internet-connected devices, data used with those devices and activity on those devices to comply with security rules;
• audit and breach management requirements, at both federal and state levels, to ensure that the credit union is adhering to specific rules in all applicable jurisdictions;
• vendor management oversight to ensure that vendors are implementing required security and privacy controls and safeguards; and
• documentation for the full life cycle of information security and privacy management activities to demonstrate due diligence.

In her previous role as an IT compliance auditor, “I would go into an organization, and if they didn’t have documentation to back up what they said they did in terms of compliance, basically they didn’t do it,” Herold says. “Documentation is essential to prove that you’re doing what you say you’re doing.”

Karen Bankston is a longtime contributor to Credit Union Management and writes about credit unions, membership growth, marketing, operations and technology. She is the proprietor of Precision Prose, Eugene, Ore.