How Financial Services Can Mitigate Risk and Improve Compliance
In financial services, the impact of fraud and noncompliance go beyond financial losses. You depend on regulations and compliance to build trust among clients. If lapses in compliance happen, and fraud cases proliferate, consumer trust in a firm can erode, which can do incredible harm to the brand.
If you had an army of people to watch over your army of employees, you could probably keep up with their spending. But you don’t and unfortunately a big chunk of budget is spent on travel and expenses (T&E). Your employees have more power over spending decisions than ever before. And while that makes things easier for them, it makes your job more difficult. So how do you take control?
The risk is real
When spending goes unmonitored, you simply don’t know who’s spending what (or where or how) until the money’s already gone. This increases the risk of duplicate payments and fraud. Same goes for the risk of falling out of step with regulatory and/or internal compliance. And if you truly aren’t on top of T&E data, the safety of your employees comes into question too.
Solving the problem
It comes down to this: You either need more bodies in place to review every reservation, transaction and receipt; or you need a system that provides oversight and makes compliance part of the process.
The choice is clear.
- Give employees simple, mobile tools that practically write expense claims for them. You get accurate information in near real-time and prevent data entry errors that could negatively impact budgets and raise red flags in compliance reviews.
- Adopt an expense management solution that automatically applies spending controls and policy rules to every transaction, increasing compliance and decreasing fraud.
- Rely on experts to audit for you. For example, Audit Services from SAP Concur can review expenses based on your spending policies so you can add an extra layer of oversight without adding overhead.
Don't just take our word for it
A recent report by IDC states that leaders in financial services "need to leverage advanced technology to augment their policies for combating fraud and maintaining compliance... and take advantage of the modern systems available to tackle the challenge of expense management. Many of the systems available today have taken significant leaps forward in terms of usability and accuracy."
If you want to know more, download the full IDC report for guidance on mitigating risk and improving compliance.