Enforcing regulatory compliance can be enough of a challenge when your workforce is in the office. When they are dispersed, how can you be sure that your marketing and communications collateral adheres to FCA rules?
1. Have – and communicate – clear processes
The first step in managing compliance, whether locally or remotely, is to have clear processes that everyone understands. Everyone should be clear, for instance, on the need for Compliance team approval before any materials are issued
2. Make sure everyone understands the rules
Now might be a good time to remind anyone producing content of the FCA’s financial promotions rules.
Some sort of remote training might help here – does everyone in your business appreciate the need for all content, not just printed materials, to go through the requisite approvals process? Do they know what a compliant sign-off procedure looks like? If not, look at whether you can run some training sessions online.
3. Improve collaboration – even when you’re not in the same place
Collaborating effectively on marketing projects improves efficiency, reduces unnecessary admin and duplication, and helps you to get financial promotions to market faster.
4. Consider security
Non-compliant financial promotions aren’t the only potential headache for Compliance teams when working remotely. Data security has been particularly in the headlines since the shift to home working, with risk experts Aon calling remote workers the ‘weakest link’ in cyber security.
Think about how you share draft communications and marketing materials – often containing business-confidential or even client-specific information – when people are working at home.
Do you mandate the use of secure work emails? Are there rules about encryption of sensitive material? Are GDPR requirements met? All these issues are potentially exacerbated when teams are dispersed.
5. Could automation help?
Yes is the answer. We touched above on some of the challenges around sharing information securely. Being able to do this is just one of the benefits of collaborative marketing solutions which enable teams, wherever they are, to work together on producing, reviewing and approving marketing collateral.
Also RegTech can take some of the ‘grunt’ work out of compliance and audit activities in particular, for example reading compliance policy documents and signposting weaknesses and improvements or revieing client files to ensure all the correct documents are in place.
So, automation can help to avoid unnecessary and labour-intensive paper-based edits and make your compliance processes more robust, by mandating approvals, as well as creating an in-built audit trail to satisfy FCA record-keeping requirements. And by making your processes slicker, you can publish content faster.
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