Why Productivity And Compliance In Finance Go Hand-In-Hand

When it comes to keeping your organization secure and operating efficiently, most businesses in finance recognize the importance of compliance. Compliance in the financial services industry is a basic requirement, and unfortunately, it can take a lot of time, money, and operational manpower to get it right. 

Luckily, financial services firms can take advantage of productivity optimization and employee monitoring software to tackle both productivity and compliance issues in their daily operations. 

Here’s why productivity and compliance go hand-in-hand in a finance firm. 

The Importance of Compliance and Productivity for Your Bottom Line

Most businesses in financial services require the exchange of sensitive data. From sharing personally identifiable information (PII) to payment data and billing information, a company’s finance department or financial institution must protect sensitive banking data. 

Data privacy is controlled by a number of regulatory laws, like CCPA and GDPR. Regulatory compliance makes data handling security necessary, but financial firms often overlook the impact that productivity management can have on compliance needs.

Financial organizations see compliance as a necessary evil, but unfortunately, they often see it directly conflicting with efficiency requirements and needs. Compliance requires employees to go through training, ongoing monitoring, extra security steps, and safety around sending information. These are natural roadblocks to optimized efficiency and come with large costs. However, with a strong compliance program, your financial business can have more success and spend less time paying fines, managing audits, and troubleshooting compliance issues.

With the right management, businesses can operationalize and optimize both processes. In doing so, financial institutions can save on compliance costs while also improving customer experience. 

How Can Improving Productivity Improve Compliance?

Whether you are a financial advisor, financial institution, or provide general financial services, compliance is mandatory in your line of work. Financial businesses must often follow a number of compliance requirements:

• Collect, analyze, and safely store personally identifiable information, sensitive banking information, and social security numbers on hard drives that are PCI DSS compliant
• Send sensitive data inter-departmentally and online
• Protect and encrypt sensitive information on network servers
• Monitor transactions for anti-money laundering and fraud
• Report suspicious transactions to FinCEN and other financial crime agencies in the United States and North America
• Risk management
• Restrict and offboard risky clients
• Provide training and security for company employees, contractors, and third-party users

All of these steps naturally make normal operations slower. Most businesses account for this additional time and budget for it; however, project and team managers can optimize productivity with productivity monitoring software. 

If your business is moving into mobile apps development and digital transformation, then the need to monitor your company becomes even more crucial. Productivity monitoring software does not only look at productivity and efficiency, but it can also track security and endpoint vulnerability. Therefore, this software can keep up with product additions while maintaining operational efficiency. 

By looking at productivity, managers also clue into the normal compliance process that should be ongoing in their company. If your employees are skipping steps, like failing to block time for reporting SARs or not performing compliance audits, then this could alert managers to potential noncompliance issues. 

Productivity monitoring only works for compliance if the reporting and back-end are set up properly. This means that businesses need to input tasks related to compliance so that employees can track those tasks. If employees aren’t using those tasks, then follow-up and disciplinary action can then be taken. 

How Managers Can Use Both Productivity and Compliance Today

Managers within finance are distanced from the compliance needs of their staff. Using a productivity management system can allow managers better insight into how those compliance tasks are being handled and provide the next steps. 

Here’s how managers can use both productivity and compliance management together:

• Set up a productivity monitoring system to track tasks, time for tasks, applications visited, and web pages visited, among others, to monitor the tasks that employees complete during work hours.
• Set up keystroke logging to provide additional protection for your customers and staff against non-compliant features.
• Audit communications internally and externally (including emails) to review compliance protocol and make noncompliance processes compliant and more efficient.
• Set up workflows for regulatory change, including access to automation technology, rather than going through the manual process of tracking and updating your compliance program.
• Organize an audit trail automatically, rather than going through it manually.

With a monitoring system like SoftActivity, managers actually gain access to insider threat protection as well. Managers can be alerted to potential security breaches to stop, mitigate, and recover as fast as possible. It can also help managers in reporting to customers the occurrence of a data breach within the times required by compliance (often around 48 hours). 

Through monitoring software, managers have a one-stop-shop for keeping tabs on employee tasks, minimizing employee threats, and keeping your company compliant. It can also improve the company culture, employee satisfaction, and employee retention so the company does not have to continually hire new employees due to high turnover. 

High turnover for finance and compliance can be challenging because the onboarding process is extremely time-consuming and costly. 

With productivity and performance monitoring software, employers can have greater insight into weak points in company performance, issues with team workload, and can take early steps through 1:1 meetings to minimize company turnover and noncompliance and boost employee engagement and productivity.

Improve Productivity and Compliance With SoftActivity

Businesses in the finance sector have a lot to worry about. Whether it is maintaining money transmitter licensing or adding new products that are compliant, businesses need to know that their internal compliance operations are functioning smoothly. This will minimize the chances of an audit, fine, or company shut down due to noncompliance. 

By monitoring productivity, businesses have greater insight into the regulatory requirements being followed, the amount of time regulation management takes up, and opportunities for productivity gains. You can’t look at one (productivity or compliance) without considering the other. 

Employee monitoring software virtually guarantees greater productivity. Businesses can use this software to:

• Track applications and websites visited
• Monitoring compliance risk in internal processes
• Manage compliance-related tasks, assign appropriate tasks, and delegate work when needed
• Track time spent on compliance vs. non-compliance

To increase productivity and compliance efforts, consider SoftActivity. SoftActivity is a security and productivity management software for businesses. Installing the software allows managers insight into remote workers, company compliance, and key performance metrics. Set up tasks for productivity and compliance measurement so that your finance company continues to be a well-run machine!

By SoftActivity Team.