Modern Digital Compliance: A Smarter Approach

Executive Summary

In recent years, business communication has become highly fragmented. Where once there was only email and phone, now there are dozens of apps and channels, with new ones emerging in prominence in different markets. This proliferation creates a headache for compliance teams. Moreover, the volume and speed of data generation also increase.

Companies need ways to scale compliance operations to keep pace with the modern business communication environment. Key to addressing this need is modern digital compliance; a hot field that sees the data governance market projected to grow to $7.42B by 2026.

How can enterprises better protect themselves from regulatory risks? They must deploy compliance solutions that effectively provide visibility across omnichannel communications to identify compliance issues and language-based risks with the help of modern innovations like Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Moreover, such a solution must be efficient, cost-effective, and scalable, among others.

Finally, an effective digital compliance solution must cover everything in an enterprise’s communications stack — including email, social media, mobile chat, and collaboration tools.

What began with email has expanded into a multitude of online communication tools, from Zoom to WhatsApp to Slack. This expansion has also opened up new and dynamic challenges for IT and compliance teams.

It’s not only highly regulated industries like financial services and life sciences that have become more dependent on third parties. Every enterprise today needs to realize that risk management and mitigation have grown more crucial than ever because of the tools that they use to communicate or collaborate. Innovative organizations find it imperative to dedicate resources to staying compliant and avoiding cybersecurity crises. 

Organizations need ways to scale their compliance operations to identify potential risks early and keep pace with digital transformation efforts. Evolution is the key – and the first step is a thoroughly modern approach to digital compliance rooted in four principles:

Mitigate

As regulations change and business grows, mitigate your compliance risks.

Streamline

Shrink oversight expenses and increase productivity through more efficient review and investigation processes.

Supervise

Gain full data governance across your organization’s communications — from emails to mobile chat, and everything in between.

Capture everything

Ensure native content capture with a full audit trail for all communications, including deleted content, not just flagged violations.

With modern digital compliance, keep up with the fragmentation and volume of data generation while protecting your most valuable assets — your people.

Digital compliance management has become something of a struggle for many companies, especially in heavily regulated industries like financial services and life sciences.

• 34% of enterprises believe business interruption is tied with cyber incidents as the leading risks among organizations.

• 9 of 10 companies expect up to 30% increase in compliance costs over the next two years due to the evolving regulatory, customer, and business demands.

• Businesses spend an average of 1.34% of their total wage bill on compliance and regulatory costs. However, this number varies substantially across various industries and within them. This number has also increased over time. In 2021, it was an average of $10,000 per employee on regulatory costs.

• High-quality professionals — especially those who combine compliance and rare technical skills — are scarce, and the demand grows across verticals like digital security, ESG, and crypto-finance.

However, there are a few silver linings for regulatory compliance teams:

1. A Navex Global study found compliance risk programs are maturing – 2 out of 5 security and compliance programs consider themselves in the top two tiers of program maturity. This is good news since, in the previous years, only 29% of compliance risk programs considered themselves  “mature and advanced.”

2. Fifty-five percent of organizations say their compliance culture is based around a “Can we?” rather than “Should we?” attitude, focusing on building a more proactive and positive compliance culture.

3. By 2026, the data governance market is projected to grow to $7.42B.

Organizations are now maturing overall with how they perceive compliance. This projected growth in the data governance market portends more enterprises adapting technologies to ensure they remain compliant, for their and their customer’s sake.

Businesses must seek a smarter, more modern approach to digital compliance. Companies need flexible compliance solutions that provide consistent policy supervision across all communication channels to scale risk reduction efforts just as they scale digital transformation projects. 

Compliance teams, with the right tools at their disposal, can significantly reduce oversight costs, eliminate risk exposure, and enable business agility. Here are the qualities to look for in a modern digital compliance solution:

Multichannel analysis and archiving 

Businesses, especially in highly-regulated industries, should always be prepared for audits and litigation, no matter what market they’re in. Archiving and journaling all of your data and ensuring litigation readiness is one way to do that. 

Solution Requirements:

• Full content capture across digital channels in native formats, including deleted posts, text, emojis, GIFs, file attachments, and metadata

• Detailed search capabilities, supported by PST export set legal hold functionality 

• Enables reduced costs, improved orchestration, and streamlined reviews

SafeGuard Cyber’s compliance platform enables this, supporting over 30 digital channels to enable archiving, journaling, and litigation readiness no matter the communication method.

Advanced language-based risk analysis with NLU

Compliance teams that don’t innovate slow down business growth efforts, ceding market share to competitors. Solutions that leverage advanced language-based risk analytics capabilities, highly improved by Natural Language Understanding (NLU), help your company to gain insight into your own data points.

Solution Requirements: 

• Capable of supporting compliance automation in auditable environments

• Powered by a purpose-built policy engine and transparent machine learning 

• Multi-language support to scale policy supervision across multiple markets

Automated policy supervision

Niche-point solutions often result in low efficacy and higher oversight costs. With the right solution, however, those concerns are immediately addressed.

Solution Requirements:

• Provide 100% coverage through automated, consistent policy supervision

• Reduce oversight costs by 80% or higher

Policy library 

Addressing FDA, FCPA, SEC, FINRA, and IIROC compliance requirements can be a pain, but it doesn’t have to be. Identify and remediate risks earlier to avoid financial penalties.

Solution Requirements:

• Ready-made and customizable policy templates help quickly zero in on industry-specific compliance risks, issues, and violations

• Enables immediate response to regulatory audit requests

Modern channels: mobile messaging and social media

Enable digital compliance across your marketing processes. With the right solution, your company can leverage the powers of social media and mobile messaging channels like WhatsApp while reducing risk exposure.

Solutions Requirements:

• Immediate alert and flagging of risky mobile messaging and social media content

• Manual or automatic problematic content remediation – whichever you prefer

• Streamlined reviews and approvals for posting content and other social media workflows

• Enables archiving of social media content

Unified Visibility for Scale

Traditional sampling methods do not scale to the volume and velocity of modern communication channels, resulting in unnecessary risk exposure. Any modern compliance solution must scale with your business needs.

Solution Requirements:

• Can process, analyze, and comprehend data across a number of languages  

• Available across various communication channels and applications, including email, mobile chat, social, and collaboration.

The SafeGuard Cyber compliance platform also scales across 30 communication channels — from email to mobile chat, social, and collaboration applications.

Transparent machine learning

Beyond low efficacy and higher oversight costs, niche point solutions also create high false positives. A highly effective machine learning-powered solution ensures a compliance risk solution and monitoring system tailored to your needs.

Solutions Requirements:

• Significant reduction/elimination of false positives 

• Compliance monitoring and supervision constantly improved through past reviews

SafeGuard Cyber’s platform addresses the principles of modern digital compliance. But don’t take our word for it; let our clients speak for themselves.

• Global Medical Device Manufacturer Reduces Millions of Dollars in Regulatory Risk

  Despite their world-class medical devices, one global manufacturer had been manually scouring free-text call records and messages for review, leaving them at risk of hefty fines due to a lack of compliance policies oversight. With SafeGuard Cyber’s compliance platform, they save at least $8M in fines for off-label promotion and have identified and remediated 28 regulatory events just within the first year.

• Global Pharmaceutical Enterprise Saves More Than $30M Using SafeGuard Cyber

  A global pharmaceutical company wanted to improve the visibility and details in their CRM. With SafeGuard Cyber’s help with automating compliance and regulatory reviews, the company saved more than $30 million in compliance review costs per month, with 100,000+ free text call records per day captured in multiple languages.

• Global Investment Firm Automates Compliance for WhatsApp

  With over $600B in AUM, a global investment firm must ensure record-keeping for overseas employees leveraging WhatsApp to conduct business. As a result of SafeGuard Cyber’s intervention, the firm achieved 100% automated supervision and coverage across 250 WhatsApp accounts for multiregional regulations, all while ensuring employee privacy.