Operations and Compliance – Human Resources

In today’s highly regulated markets it is not just important, but critical that operational managers are working shoulder to shoulder with compliance management to ensure that the company stays in line with the ever-changing regulations. 

Compliance is not only the job of the compliance management team but every individual to ensure that you can  track everyone’s individual efforts in ensuring the company is compliant.

In order to remain fully complaint, Compliance and Operations must work with the Human Resources aspects of compliance, as well as the audit, control, proof of compliance and timeliness and then look to enhance compliance capabilities over the underlying existing systems.

So how can Corporate Modelling‘s leading BOWFO solution OPX  help with these?  Let’s look at these aspects of compliance in turn. In part 1 of this blog series we will looks at Human Resources and Compliance and Process Adherence and Compliance.

Human Resources and Compliance

The FCA handbook states that as a principle of business a firm should employ personnel with the skills, knowledge and expertise necessary to discharge their duties.  

OPX has an in-depth skills matrix which can be configured not just to have details about the skills associated with Clients, Processes, Activities and Product classes and features, but can be extended to include any skills required for a specific business object such as a Policy or Account.  If for example, a product needs a suitable qualification in order to work with it simply add this in as a Skill against the uploaded stub by adding a Certificate field and the appropriate value and then any individual administrator would require this certificate to be able to process the work.

Skills in OPX are also held at various levels such as experienced or trainee; these are user configurable. You can also set up an OPX task to deprecate skills if they are not used for a specific period. If after say, 30 or 60 days, this skill is deprecated if not used or the skill level is reduced. Therefore, work will not be routed to a person until they are retrained or when this is overridden manually by the team leaders.  Team leaders can get skills based reports showing what skills will expire as well as all the other skill based reports available to them that show their team capabilities.

Process Adherence and Compliance

OPX allows you to allocate specific activities to specific skills, thus allocate work to skilled individuals. This allows for example, the implementation of a solution for the segregation of duties.

An organisation should normally ensure that no single individual has unrestricted authority to do all of the following:

(1) initiate a transaction

(2) bind the firm

(3) make payments

(4) account for them

OPX can ensure that the authorisation step in a process is not carried out by the same person that has worked on the case in this process to date. This can ensure that the process does not break the first two or three steps when used in conjunction with the process activities skills and your job role descriptions.

OPX also has a comprehensive Checklist and Webform system.  Checklists can be configured in a similar manner to online surveys and can be launched before or after the user is presented with a case to work on (or after they complete the case). This isn’t just a simple tick box system, this can be used to track the work that an individual has carried out, the appropriate checks defined by compliance, and as with all things in OPX, this can then be easily reported on. This can be made mandatory to ensure that administrators are complying with the process; we call this Process Adherence.

Web Forms are a powerful ‘catch all’, allowing the operations team’s super users (users who configure the system and work in operations) to create sophisticated web data entry pages and associated reports. These can be simple, one page data entries or multi-page, with or without business rules for validation and have a host of features.  Web forms can be executed by the administrators when required and in the next release of OPX, we will provide the ability for the web forms to be  launched before or after a case is handled and associated with the case for easy reporting by compliance.

In Part 2 we’re discussing Audit and Control, Underlying Systems and Timeliness. If you would like further information about OPX in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team.

(Image courtesy of Blue Diamond Gallery)