Process automation is an excellent option for regulated sectors where compliance and risk management are key
by Laurent Leseigneur, Pre-Sales Engineer, and Hubert Lagrenaudie, Partner Manager at Bonitasoft
In an environment where regulations imposed by European and national legislators change often, companies in highly regulated sectors (banking, insurance, health, etc.) are faced with major compliance and risk management challenges. Their key to success lies in the ability to nimbly integrate these changes. Process automation is a good way to ensure rigorous traceability and rapid modification. Business Process Management (BPM) tools prove to be essential allies for “dynamic compliance.”
The pace of regulatory developments imposed by legislators at European and national level has direct impact on businesses. Institutions such as banks and insurance companies are particularly under the close surveillance of control bodies which ensure operational compliance. For these organizations, it is not so much the frequency of regulatory changes that poses challenges, but rather the ability to integrate them quickly. Organizations must adapt their processes rapidly to respond to diverse new situations - for example, adjustments to credit lending rates or producing compliance documents.
In this context, process automation solutions provide robust, stable and scalable applications that can be quickly adapted by IT development teams. Compliance is not a static state, but a dynamic capacity to evolve with updated regulations.
Ensure traceability and compliance
Any automation required knowledge of regulations and mastery of complex compliance processes. Companies can standardize their operating procedures and reduce human errors through automation, and can better assure the consistent quality, good traceability, precise time stamping, and archiving needed to comply with new standards. Automated processes can be equipped with alerts and key process indicators, such as error rate, processing times, or the number of complaints.
Business Process Management (BPM) tools offer significant benefits when automating complex compliance processes. They natively integrate auditing and traceability, so it’s possible to track who made what decision and when.
They offer IT teams an agile environment and a rapid development cycle and facilitate collaboration with internal users. BPM tools can link heterogeneous environments together, which supports end-to-end traceability and accelerates the modernization of applications that depend on legacy systems that are often obsolete, cumbersome to maintain and evolve, and no longer sufficient to meet today’s demands.
Flexibility for compliance processes
Process automation solutions, which use standards like BPMN 2.0, can ensure that automated processes are built in accordance with standard and required practices. These standards facilitate the creation of tailor-made, modular processes that can be easily modified or updated without disrupting current operations, using a DevOps approach.
Modularity is also an important element for integrating new regulatory developments rapidly with minimum disruption. The BPM framework is ideal for process robustness, traceability, and security, and to respond to compliance and risk management. It’s easier to manage changes and new developments for business applications developed on a BPM foundation. Further, the modularity of automated processes offers the flexibility to manage regulatory variations by geographic location and sector, and by specific use case. Processes can be connected to external services via APIs to obtain necessary authorizations from tax or financial authorities.
In summary, process automation via BPM tools is an essential asset for agile compliance and efficient risk management in highly regulated sectors. It offers the ability to meet regulatory challenges with agility and precision that were previously unattainable with monolithic applications.
