2014 is going to be an extremely challenging year for your compliance staff. First, you have the numerous and extraordinarily complex new mortgage regulations that go into effect in January, 2014 that may affect multiple departments within your organization. These will be followed later in the year by the new combined TILA/RESPA disclosures. Second, the regulatory agencies are stepping up their scrutiny of fair lending compliance based on more sophisticated analyses of HMDA data, the new CFPB consumer compliant database and ongoing concerns about steering and other pricing and compensation issues. Lastly, the agencies have stated that they expect financial institutions to have an effective enterprise risk management process in place that identifies, evaluates, and monitors risk throughout the organization.
To be prepared for these challenges the most important feature that your compliance program needs to include is a means to conduct a comprehensive review of your institution’s day-to-day compliance with these new and with existing regulatory requirements. This should include a review of your written policies and procedures, your mortgage operations, branch operations, plastic card operations, electronic services, marketing and advertising materials (including your website), and your BSA/AML and fair lending compliance programs. The review can be done internally, but the challenge for your already over-burdened compliance staff will be finding the time to do the very time-consuming hunting and searching through reams of policies, loan files, documents, and disclosures. As a result, the best, and most necessary tool, in your compliance arsenal may be a contract with an outside firm to conduct an annual compliance review.
AffirmX provides a compliance solution that is specifically designed to perform the hunting and searching for you. By utilizing cloud technology, AffirmX can provide compliance experts to perform a comprehensive compliance review of all areas of your operation, without the cost of bringing a team of experts onsite. In addition, the review is performed in a accordance with a risk assessment that ensures that your particular areas of operation that represent the greatest risk for compliance issues are reviewed first and to a greater degree than areas that represent lesser risk. The AffirmX compliance solution stretches the review process over the course of a year so that any issues that are identified can be dealt with in a timely and efficient manner and immediately reviewed again by our compliance experts. In addition, AffirmX offers an Enterprise Risk Assessment and an IT Security and Vulnerability Assessment through the same platform.
Request a web-based demonstration today to learn more about how AffirmX’s unique solutions can help your financial institution.
