May 13, 2014 - By the start of 2014, nearly 6,000 changes were made to the U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority/Prudential Regulation Authority handbook alone, causing an overload of new regulatory information for financial institutions.

To help institutions reduce the risk of noncompliance and resulting regulatory penalties, Wolters Kluwer Financial Services has released "Finding the Way to Regulatory Change Management". The new white paper examines the challenges caused by this global information overload and outlines a 10 step "Challenge Checklist" to help institutions work more efficiently and effectively towards regulatory compliance. The steps, which are accompanied by more detail in the paper, include:

1. Identify the scope of the content required to support the organization, jurisdictions and the lines of business.
2. Determine the current and/or desired information sources: legislative, regulatory agency, exchanges, news wires, trade associations, other third-party providers.
3. Evaluate existing source information delivery systems to manage the delivered content.
4. Identify introduced/enacted laws and proposed/adapted regulations and miscellaneous publications with financial services impact.
5. Develop monitoring processes and assign accountability for the ongoing identification and monitoring of tasks.
6. Evaluate enacted and adopted measures to determine what affects the organization.
7. Determine the operational impacts and steps to be taken to achieve compliance.
8. Implement required process changes, utilizing reporting functionality to track timely implementation.
9. Establish accountability/ownership for the new process steps.
10. Control the new processes and maintain control through periodic audits.

“The volume of information is only part of the issue for firms. Eliminating manual processes and having the required expertise to make clarity of the often complex laws produced by regulators are also stumbling blocks on the road to effective regulatory change management,” said Richard Pike, vice president, market management, non-financial risk at Wolters Kluwer Financial Services. “The 10-step challenge checklist, along with the issues and road mapping outlined in this paper, provides a straightforward guide to many of the questions firms should be posing themselves.”

Wolters Kluwer Financial Services’ Regulatory Change Management offering helps organizations effectively manage the process of change in their risk and compliance programs. By bringing content, workflow control and robust reporting capabilities to the regulatory change management process, the solutions helps organizations effectively manage change, prove compliance and thus make better business decisions.