By Ben Mason, Founder, My Compliance Centre

A post I recently shared on LinkedIn about a hypothetical board meeting caused quite a ripple, striking a chord with more than 1,500 followers and connections.

It went something like this: I’m a compliance leader and I never want a repeat of the experience I’ve just had when presenting to my board. They spent less than five minutes on my report. There were no questions and there wasn’t even a decision on whether to accept it.

Reflecting on this meeting, it became apparent that the Board’s subdued response was my fault. I’d built a compliance function that was evidenced, monitored and regulatory-ready. Yet it was missing one vital quality: information that the Board could actually engage with.

Does this scenario sound familiar?

The gap between delivery and decision-making

In my conversations with compliance leaders across the industry, it’s a pattern I see repeated time and again. Many firms have significantly improved the structure of their compliance reporting over the last few years. They have more data, better dashboards and more frequent updates.

However, far fewer have improved the usefulness of that reporting.

This matters because boards are moving past the stage of asking “what has been done?”. Today they need to know what that data actually means for the business. They are asking questions about points of exposure, confidence levels and the availability of evidence if a regulator were to ask for it tomorrow.

So, if a compliance report is to truly play a role in driving the business forward, it needs to talk about much more than your team’s activity. It has to evolve from “noting” to “deciding”.

Turning movement into milestones

At My Compliance Centre, we’re helping businesses to bridge the gap between compliance delivery and board-level understanding through technology. Our approach represents a shift from manual, narrative-heavy reporting to automated data-led supervision.

And happily, this just happens to chime with numerous themes at this year’s Global RegTech Summit in London, with sessions set to explore topics such as the automation imperative, intelligence-led programmes and resilient regulatory change management to name but a few.

In fact, the event’s focus on data-driven oversight and real-time intelligence points exactly to where the industry is heading. Nowadays, regulators want to see the evidence of your policies in action, surfaced through insights that are accurate, actionable and easy to digest.

Joining the conversation at the RegTech Summit

I will be attending the summit on Wednesday 20th May, and I’m keen to discuss with peers how we, as an industry, can move away from reporting for reporting’s sake.

If we want our compliance functions to be seen as a value-add rather than an overhead, we have to stop presenting findings and start offering choices. We need to identify escalation triggers that the Board can agree to in advance, so that when a risk reaches them, they have the framework in place to deal with it – and information that they find engaging and, dare I say, useful.

Let’s connect

Are you attending the RegTech Summit this May? If so, I’d love to grab a coffee or find a moment between sessions to share insights on how we can make compliance reporting answer the questions the Board is actually asking.

Please feel free to contact me directly at Ben.mason@mycompliancecentre.com to let me know if you’ll be there and if you’re open to meeting. And if you want to read my LinkedIn post and join the conversation, you’ll find that here.