In Dun & Bradstreet’s recent compliance survey, 61% of compliance professionals reported that excessive workload forces them into reactive firefighting instead of proactive risk management. This will come as no surprise to compliance professionals. Perhaps more surprisingly, was that most businesses reported they are turning away customers due to a lack of risk visibility.
The survey, carried out in April 2024, covered 1,354 compliance professionals in the UK and eight other European countries. It aimed to measure the impact KYC regulations are having on compliance workloads – and confirmed what many of us already suspected.
When asked, “By how much, if at all, has the demand on your compliance team’s time increased in the past year?” Respondents reported an average increase of over 30%. Furthermore, 64% of respondents agreed, “The ever-expanding regulatory landscape puts immense pressure on our compliance team”. Despite this, few businesses appear to be addressing the problem, with only 38% planning “additional budget to invest in compliance processes in the next 12 months”.
While these findings may come as little surprise to those who work in the compliance field, the findings about business impact might make their colleagues sit up and take notice. 55% of businesses surveyed reported they had been, “forced to reject potential customers due to a lack of risk visibility”. In addition to this, 56% reported that “an overload of false positive matches occasionally forces us to reject customers due to time constraints”. In challenging economic times, turning away potential business due to regulatory pressures is far from ideal.
Digging into the problem reveals the usual culprits. 62% of respondents reported their workload still relied to some extent on “inefficient manual processing”. With regulators seemingly likely to continue increasing expectations on compliance departments, the case for compliance automation is stronger than ever before.
If you would like to read more about the results of our compliance survey, you will find them in our Perpetual KYC Guide – Automating Third Party Compliance. Or, if you would like to learn more about how your company can accelerate its compliance automation journey, reach out to us here.
Accelerate your third-party compliance and evolve to Perpetual KYC with D&B Risk Analytics Compliance Intelligence. By defining your policy in our highly configurable risk engine, you can automate your onboarding, accelerate your due diligence workflows, and focus on what really matters. This enables you to increase your compliance effectiveness while reducing your costs and workload. It’s also the foundation for always-on compliance monitoring and Perpetual KYC. By combining our unrivalled ability to identify hidden ownership structures – with over 100 watch lists and sanction lists worldwide – you gain deeper insight and the ability to proactively mitigate risk.