For those of you who may be interested
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http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202545863755
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Thomson Reuters Governance, Risk, and Compliance group launched Accelus Compliance Manager, a single platform designed to track and monitor regulatory requirements and link those requirements to an organization’s internal compliance and business processes. In effect, ACM incorporates regulatory information and the risk of noncompliance with business goals.
The Accelus Compliance Manager targets audit, compliance, finance, legal, and risk professionals in financial services, law firms, insurance, and other highly regulated industries. ACM brings together several stages of compliance that every organization needs to address, namely, to: 1) understand, evaluate, and map applicable regulations to business processes; 2) monitor and track regulatory change; 3) identify and communicate controls to mitigate risk and comply with regulatory schemes; 4) test, monitor, and audit risk controls; and 5) document and report on risk controls to management and regulators. See the ACM process in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Accelus Compliance Manager workflow for organizations in regulated industries.
To help identify regulatory risk and changes to the regulatory environment, ACM includes international coverage of over 230 regulators and exchanges to track hundreds of regulatory events that may affect an organization. The ACM platform then helps the organization map laws, regulations, as well as policies and procedures to business structure, be it region, country, business unit, desk level, or individual. When regulations change, ACM tools provide alerts to stakeholders via email.
Andrew Neblett, senior vice president of Compliance, Audit, and Risk, within the GRC group, states that customers are presented with thousands of regulatory developments each year and that manual processes were no longer sufficient to handle them. According to a survey of more than 500 compliance practitioners from international financial services firms conducted by Thomson Reuters GRC from November 2011 to January 2012, the “majority of the respondents had fewer than five people on their team to manage the ever-growing compliance obligations for their organization.” And over a third of the survey’s respondents said they “spend more than an entire working day each week considering [regulatory] changes and one fifth spend in excess of 10 hours during an average week.” And that does not include the time respondents spent with legal counsel and to liaison with regulators.
ACCELUS SUITE
The Accelus platform is a suite of information products and software tools derived from Thomson Reuters’ acquistions and in-house information products, such as Westlaw Business, Westlaw Compliance Advisor, West’s Capitol Watch, and Oden Insurance Services, which operates as a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters.
Westlaw Business is an information service that provides data on corporate filings, law, and expert business guidance. Westlaw Compliance Advisor compiles industry expert guidance on compliance in plain English. West’s Capitol Watch tracks federal and state bills and regulations. And Oden Insurance Services provides insurance compliance and advisory information and workflow tools to customers.
Also included in the Accelus suite are tools from its Dec. 2008 acquisition of Paisly (a software provider of GRC software, which help manage financial controls, internal audit processes, and enterprise risk management); its June 2010 acquisition of Complinet (an information service provider for financial institutions); its Mar. 2011 acquisition of Northland Solutions (a manufacturer of compliance alert software); and its May 2011 acquisition of World-Check (a software provider of customer and employee identity and authentication schemes, reputation screening, risk assessment, and due diligence).
Major features of the ACM platform aim to allow compliance professionals to:
? receive, manage, and monitor relevant regulatory events and obligations in one place;
? create relationships between regulations and internal business structures, policies, and risks;
? develop, review, approve, and manage policies;
? assess impact of regulatory events and rules on the business;
? prioritize regulations by impact and risk criteria;
? view compliance status reports in dashboards and heat-maps;
? send automatic, event-driven emails and alerts;
? create training and exam schedules for compliance; and
? share control and review activities throughout the organization.
For more information, see the Thomson Reuters’ web pages on Accelus Compliance Manager.
