March 20, 2017

Professor Joe Says: Building a Fair Lending Compliance Program

Joe Aakre is Compli’s Senior Sales Engineer, but you might know him better as Professor Joe, our resident scholar and lecturer on all topics compliance. Earlier this month, Joe broke out his signature pedagogical pipe and led us through a webinar on how to use our cloud-based software, Compligo, for Fair Lending compliance.

If you skipped class, here’s a sample of what you missed:

The Anatomy of an Automated Compliance Program

Joe told us that an automated workforce compliance system can be broken into two interdependent parts: compliance management and complaint management. Both of these programs encompass four complementary processes. For this presentation, Joe focused solely the compliance management piece.

1. Education

The first element of compliance management is education, because it takes place on several different levels. In onboarding new hires, for instance, you need to correctly disseminate all information pertinent to how your organization operates, as well as any regulatory items that affect your business, so that all employees know their legal obligations early. Besides new hires, people who get promoted also need to be educated about their new roles and responsibilities, and everyone at your organization should be trained on new policies, procedures, and regulations as they come along.

2. Certification

Your company and employees must be able to prove compliance through a certification process—how else can you tell if what people learned through the educational process is sticking? Certification may include interactive policies, assessments, quizzes, and attestations of written policies and procedures, among a myriad of other elements.

3. Reminders

Unlike students cramming for a test, compliant employees can’t afford to forget everything they’ve learned as soon as the assessment is over. Reminders ensure policies and procedures stay fresh in the minds of your team members. For example, employees may read a policy in January, but nothing pertinent to it may come up until August or September. Reminders can be much shorter than the first training—a couple of minutes rather than an hour.

4. Monitoring

Finally, organizations should monitor the compliance system to make sure that it’s continually improving and adapting to employees’ real training results. Monitoring can happen, for example, when you’re reviewing compliance data and notice that employees consistently miss a certain question on an assessment, which indicates that the question needs to be tweaked or replaced. Monitoring can point you toward pervasive problems in your company’s overall policies, the timing and frequency of training, inconsistencies between departments, and so on.

Automated Fair Lending Compliance with Compligo

I could walk you through Fair Lending compliance in Compligo using the rest of the space here, but why spend thousands of words on something you could watch in a 10 minutes? I’ll let our esteemed professor be your guide instead.

Check out Compligo in action—view “Ask Professor Joe: Using Compligo for Fair Lending Compliance” for free, on demand.