Regulations for employees working in financial services are a lot higher than in most industries. In fact, compliance regulations for finance teams are getting more complex.
According to Comply advantage, the trends for 2019 are as follows. Compliance for information sharing and ultimate beneficial owners. The sanctions landscape becomes even more complex. The regulatory regimes are going to get an overhaul. So needless to say your financial services training and training audits should be stepped up a gear as well.
How to improve the outcome of employee training audits for regulatory compliance
To minimise risk and ensure that employees are always following best practice, employee training audits should be used. But how can you improve your compliance training to ensure it’s the best that it can be? Discover below:
Measure culture and content retention
To find out how effective your training has been, a compliance training audit can help. These audits allow you to discover any gaps in training material that you might have. This means a manager can provide the missing content to improve results.
You should regularly carry out performance assessments for each employee. By doing these you can see how well your employee’s are retaining the information which they have learnt. You will also be able to see how much they are putting their training into action. When you carry out your performance assessment you should be checking to see that your staff are:
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Highly ethical.
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Technically skilled.
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Have a good knowledge of investment products.
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Up to date on costs and charges.
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Know everything about portfolio management.
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Are up to date on customer data policies, market structures, valuation principles and more.
You can tell if your training is working simply by looking at the general behaviour and culture of your business. Is it clear that you have a culture of compliance without looking at data? If you don’t think so, then you know that you need to have a deeper look into whether the training is actually being carried out. Look how often it’s being done and what the scores are.
Use a digital learning solution
If you work in a heavily regulated industry you would be silly to not use a digital learning system. They do most of the hard work for you so you don’t need to stress over the finer details. they can:
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Track employee learning.
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View insights and analytics.
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Allow you to quickly edit or update training content in line with industry regulations.
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Direct employees to the right content.
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Use automation to ensure that learning is always carried out and on time.
They allow you to see who has completed which compliance courses and they provide reports. The reports allow you to see which compliance areas most people are struggling with. By having all of your compliance training records in one place on the digital learning solution. This makes the auditing process clearer and easier to carry out.
Have more regular audits
Yes, yearly audits are essential in the financial services industry. But only having yearly audits can leave you open to compliance risk. You should minimise this risk by having smaller audits around 5 times per year (depending on how large your organisation is). In these audits, you should look at compliance requirements and training courses which employees need to take. By having these you will be able to more easily spot gaps in training and compliance management.
If you are looking for a solution which speeds up your audit processes, makes it easier to analyse results and improve employee learning. Get in touch with us and discover how we can transform your employee learning, improve audits and minimise risk. Contact us on +44 (0)1273 778289 or email us at hi@ocasta.com
