UK: businesses’ compliance capabilities are worryingly below par
March 22, 2023
Quod Orbis, leaders in Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) and cyber security services, recently released a report analyzing the compliance capabilities of UK businesses.
This report looked at senior IT decision-makers at businesses of more than 1,000 employees in a wide variety of sectors, and found an alarming number of businesses fail to maintain continual readiness.
While most of the surveyed businesses admit their inability to comply to regulations, the report highlights a very worrisome issue: 47% of businesses remain “naive to key risk indicators.”
Quod Orbis is now warning these businesses that failure to keep up to date with regulations could result in costly mistakes.
The numbers
42% of surveyed businesses say they have a dedicated, in-house compliance capability team with direct access to systems and data, 26% of businesses use in-house teams to consult other departments for the same data. Despite this, only 14% of overall businesses are able to keep up continual compliance.
The readiness of businesses to be able to track their own departments leave much to be desired: 52% of surveyed businesses have “fragmented processes that require manual effort”, another 52% are not even able to keep track of the amounts of resources it takes for the compliance team to acquire data from other departments, 70% don’t monitor the amount of time spent by other departments to prepare said data, or the time they spent verifying data.
Overall, 42% of businesses are worried about the time it takes to process and formal data for other departments.
15% of businesses admitted they need to use more than 90% of their technology in order to keep up with compliance, another 37% need between 70-90% and 25% require 50-70%. Only 16% said they need less than half of these resources to keep up.
…a whopping 46% of respondents admitted they have a “ general level of ignorance of key risk indicators throughout the business.”
Barriers
28% of businesses of correspondents admitted that their lack of compliance comes from a place of fear: they don’t want to embrace new processes as they do not understand them fully. Another 23% is unwilling to change processes because of the sunk-cost: they don’t want to drop processes that took so much time and effort develop in the first place.
The biggest technological issue reported was the inability of solutions to access all necessary data and systems, identified as a barrier by a quarter of respondents.
Martin Greenfield, CEO of Quod Orbis, said these figures have a “worrying air.”
Firstly, despite decent numbers of businesses investing in dedicated compliance teams, they do not seem to be able to deliver continual readiness, Secondly, they don’t have the visibility and insight into the full technology estate to deliver high levels of confidence to the board, even though compliance teams are clearly being tasked with risk reduction and ensuring cyber security controls are up to scratch.
According to Martin, we can address the fear and misunderstanding of technology in order to drive up compliance, as systems exist in place that can deliver accurate insight.
Keeping up with compliance requirements is imperative, and businesses need to find a way to adhere to new guidelines day by day if they want to avoid problems in the future.
Want to learn more? Check out The Fintech Times’ full write-up here.
Share your thoughts on our LinkedIn page.
VAMP: Visa’s New Fraud & Chargeback Monitoring Program
Data Reveals FinTechs Are Not Focusing Their Efforts in Attracting Gen Z Consumers
