So it’s been nearly a month since UK financial services regulation was shaken up.

The biggest of the changes was how the regulatory powers of the now defunct Financial Services Authority (FSA) are now separated into two bodies – the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

While the separation of powers is designed to focus on regulatory issues with greater intensity, it does mean some firms like banks, insurers and major investment firms are now ‘dual regulated’ by two independent groups for prudential and conduct.

To my mind, this creates complications in terms of how data is going to be filed and mined since it’s been reported these groups “will work to different objectives and act separately with firms but will coordinate internally to share information and data.”

In the UK alone we often see reports of potential fraud, price fixing and large banks ‘losing’ important transactional data which makes me think the PRA and FCA have a tough job on their hands. 

Today, virtually inaccessible unstructured content provides organisations with a major headache – it’s difficult to maintain a 360-degree view of your organisation. When combined with restrictive processes, it can prevent your organisation from effectively managing potential risk. Both electronic and paper-based files are increasingly stored across multiple physical and virtual environments, meaning simple processes become labour-intensive challenges. Email trails, returned invoices and stacks of paper shuffled between offices essentially become a pile of missed opportunities and blind spots. This is all created by your enterprise applications’ inability to quickly and cost effectively adapt to processes and cases that don’t always follow the rules, waves of new content created by a mobile workforce and changing regulation and compliance.

Addressing these issues requires an effective process and content management solution.

Tactically speaking, content management technology allows users to retrieve the documents and information they need, while protecting critical information from unauthorised access. From a broader perspective, it lets you manage the lifecycle of enterprise information by applying records and retention policies, ensuring faster response to audits and enhancing compliance. Because enterprise content can be integrated with applications throughout an organisation, it also fosters better communication and collaboration amongst departments.

Business process management deals with the people aspect of tasks as well as more system-centric activities that need little or no action from knowledge workers. Robust solutions allow process analysis and mining for ongoing improvement, using data from your system of record to analyse current practices and then model and test alternative methods for completing key business tasks.

But the most important benefits are realised when process and content management are integrated into one solution. When used in conjunction with enterprise applications, this allows your organisation to:

• Automate standard tasks to achieve ‘straight-through processing’ or ‘touchless pass’
• Make information and documents readily available to handle exceptions or tasks that knowledge workers are required to complete
• Gain the insights needed to identify bottlenecks and remedy them before becoming major issues
• Ensure more complete compliance with business rules and regulations

A bolder step that’ll deliver longer sustainable gains is to embrace a strong intelligent straight-through document capture solution as an integral element of your business strategy. Automated intelligent capture systems help eliminate errors occurring from manual data entry as well as speeding cycle time, offering much-needed scalability and visibility and improving access to information. These systems work by learning from a small sample set, which then allows a hugely diverse range of document layouts to be processed, comparable to a human learning approach. What’s more, standardising data capture across departments allows for a consistent and coherent platform approach across an organisation as a whole.