Document Compliance Made Easy

As the marketing executive for HotDocs, a large part of my job is to understand our customers’ documentation challenges and highlight the functionality and benefits that HotDocs customers can use to overcome these challenges. So, a lot of my time is spent speaking to our support team to get a better understanding of our customers’ pain.

“If you think compliance is expensive – try non-compliance.” – Former US Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty

A regular topic that comes up in conversation when discussing the financial sector is “Compliance” and how our customers use HotDocs to adapt to ever changing compliance regulations. You see, when a compliance regulation change is made, a bank must update their processes accordingly, which includes documentation. This involves editing existing documents, removing or adding clauses, checking the information conveyed in the document is easy to digest and ensuring all staff have access to the new documentation. This can be extremely time consuming if a bank does not have a document automation system like HotDocs.

Just how much of a problem is compliance for banks and other professional services organizations?

A recent report by Thomson Reuters included some interesting statistics that reveal just how much pressure compliance updates are having on banks. The report showed that the average bank spends £40 million on Know Your Customer (KYC) and Customer Due Diligence (CDD) compliance, with one global bank spending as much as £300 million. The report also showed that increasing compliance regulations are not just costing banks financially, customer experience is being affected through increasing client on-boarding times. For example, a client has an average of 8 interactions with a bank during on-boarding, with one global bank stating the process can take up to 2 months due to compliance laws.

Since the 2008 crisis, compliance updates are more frequent than ever and with strict deadlines to ensure financial documents are compliant, banks must ensure their documentation processes are flexible enough to give them time to adapt to the latest change.

Ensuring documentation is compliant and up to date is one thing, but how can you ensure all of your staff are using the right documentation? Over the years we have encountered various systems that organisations use to try to ensure staff are accessing the most up to date information and documentation. A common practice is storing one master Word document as a “template” on a shared drive and informing staff to only use that template going forward. Sounds simple enough, right? But it doesn’t take long for staff to begin saving that document to their local drives and forgetting which document is the most up to date.

This process is a nightmare when a compliance change is made — how do you ensure your document control processes are followed? First of all, you have no way to track the documentation, but now that this change has been made, you have no way of ensuring your staff are using the updated documents. Thankfully, document automation software like HotDocs makes that easy.

How can HotDocs help?

Thankfully, with HotDocs, banks and financial organisations can make changes and update their documents instantly, allowing the bank to ensure documents are compliant.

HotDocs is designed to increase efficiency and mitigate risk of errors in documents. This includes ensuring documents are accurate and comply with the latest legislation from financial regulators. Most importantly, when it comes to compliance, HotDocs empowers banks by providing the flexibility they need to respond to document compliance updates.

HotDocs can assist with a range of compliance regulations such as Know Your Customer (KYC) or Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) legislation, and allows banks to update document templates easily. That’s why HotDocs is used by multiple global banks and other multinational organisations to produce documents with no risk of errors.

Interested? Choose your experience: Get a free trial of HotDocs today, or choose a 1:1 demo instead.