How much time and money should you spend on becoming compliant? – Here are some of the signs that you have achieved a reasonable balance between compliance requirements and business growth:

• CEO actually likes talking to compliance people, because it helps him or her realize that there are many additional services or features the company can launch and offer without any extra efforts, just using existing permissions and licenses
• Your engineering team does not need to work 70-100% on compliance, it should not be higher than 30%, and even less than that most of the time.
• Instead of fearing auditors or regulatory inspections, you look forward to them, because you know that you can re-use positive audit reports and encouraging regulatory feedback to secure additional partnerships or business opportunities.
• You know exactly who you need to hire (and most likely it’s not more compliance people).
• As you grow your business, your cost of compliance per customer gets significantly cheaper. You actually enjoy the process of building your business, planning the future and growing, which is what you always wanted.

What will not work?

• Your strategy is “do nothing” – you just hope that some divine intervention offers clarity and removes frictions between compliance, engineering and business. There are no miracles in compliance.
• When the CEO or Lead Engineer feel they have no choice but to read the original legislation and write compliance documentation, because their advisors, lawyers or head of compliance keep disappointing them. It won’t work, because it means other (more important) priorities are not addressed.
• Hire Big 4 to define the problem and find a way forward – they will interview your team members, ask you to complete some checklists and will organize a number of “let’s feel good about our team communications” workshops, but nothing will change in your underlying processes.
• Sign up for numerous free webinars, newsletters or white papers that offer solutions. It won’t work, because these potentially valuable resources will pull you into many different directions without a coherent strategy and without offering any support with implementation.
• Work harder and longer. If that worked, you would not be reading this sentence now.

Want to experience a new, easy way or coordinating cross-departmental compliance issues? You are welcome to join my Outsourcing Documentation next week!

This is a *must attend* if:

1. You operate a regulated business and you don’t think you have any issues with outsourcing documentation. Think again – what will be the focus of your next audit or regulatory review? Believe it or not, with disrupted payments chains, Wirecard story, remote working arrangements and overall sense of economic uncertainty, the stability of financial services, counter-party risks and dependency on service providers are on the top of any audit or inspection agenda this year. In fact, this and your safeguarding requirements would be the areas where auditors and regulators will likely spend 90% of their time and questions.
2. Your organization suffers from ongoing frictions and conflicts over whose job should it be to document partner relationships, monitor SLAs with vendors or ensure that your outsourcing compliance is decent. You may even feel like you have a disproportional amount of emails and meeting on this topic but see very little progress.
3. You know outsourcing is somewhat an issue, but DON’T currently have any clear ideas on what to prioritize or how to get started, and you are concerned that you may be caught off guard.

Convinced? – REGISTER HERE and learn how to document your critical outsourcing arrangements and get a “fill in the blanks” template to make it easier.

We will also cover the following questions:

• What is outsourcing vs using a software?
• What is critical outsourcing vs not material outsourcing?
• How exactly to risk assess and document critical outsourcing and where do you even start?

Have a wonderful #TGIF and hopefully see you next week on Thursday and Friday!