2017 – The Year of the Compliance Management System
The new year is here, and with any luck you’re already eating better, supporting local causes and spending more time with the people you love. But if you work for a finance institution or operate an automotive dealership—and especially if you’re involved in the finance and insurance department—I’d like to suggest another resolution for 2017:
Invest in a compliance management system.
I’m not just writing this because Compli provides an industry-leading CMS solution. F&I and Showroom recently published its 4 compliance predictions for 2017—and at the top of the list? You guessed it: “‘Compliance Management System’ Becomes 2017’s Buzzword.”
According to the magazine:
Remember how crazy everyone was about the internet before the dot-com bubble burst in 2001? Just about every vendor rolled out solutions that allowed them to leverage buzzwords like “internet” and “digital” in marketing pieces and messaging.
I believe 2017 will be the year dealers will finally embrace the need for a compliance management system (CMS). Finance sources have already done so, thanks to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
A CMS is nothing more than a structured approach to ensuring compliance with required regulations. Dealers who are compliant with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s Safeguards Rule and Red Flags Rule have already effectively employed a CMS.
I couldn’t have said it better myself, although perhaps “CMS” isn’t so much a buzzword as it is a pre-existing phrase for an increasingly necessary approach to compliance. As I mentioned, one the primary solutions Compli provides is an end-to-end CMS any organization can harness to streamline and enhance its compliance initiatives, so the topic is not a new one for us. Maybe we’re just ahead of the curve. We’ve written about compliance management systems plenty of times in the past, from determining whether your CMS is ready for the CFPB to the essential parts every effective system shares. In fact, you can find an entire section dedicated to compliance management systems in our Resources library.
The gist of much of what we’ve written thus far is that a CMS is your best tool—and in many cases your only tool—in responding to the CFPB and other regulators. In today’s regulatory environment, every employee at your organization has more responsibility than ever before to stay on top of the latest laws and complete the requisite trainings. And any gap in compliance in the complex network between dealers, lenders and third party vendors could spell lawsuits and penalties for, as well as long-term damage to consumer trust in, every organization involved.
How does Compli’s CMS solution work? We’ve addressed the complexity and ever-changing nature of compliance through, well, another buzzword: automation. In everyday terms, our CMS takes care of time-consuming, messy processes (like assigning tasks and exporting training data) for you, so you can spend more less time worrying about your compliance status and more time building your business.
With that in mind, I’m proposing an addendum to F&I and Showroom’s number 1 prediction, and suggesting that the piece of vocabulary you need to learn is “automated CMS,” and not just for 2017—but, if current trends continue, 2018, 2019, 2020 and beyond.
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