What are cross-border country manuals?
Country manuals or handbooks are jurisdiction-specific regulatory documents that outline all rules impacting the business activities of financial services organisations in foreign countries. They detail what is permitted or restricted and help financial institutions avoid compliance risks when serving foreign clients. Handbooks are essential for legal and compliance teams, but also for the compliant business activity of wealth and asset managers, HR, marketing, and even IT teams.
What are compliance apps?
Compliance apps are tools for financial institutions that give immediate access to the latest dos and don’ts that govern day-to-day activities with foreign clients or in foreign countries. They enable faster decision-making and efficient knowledge sharing internally between legal, business and other departments throughout the organisation. They are sometimes also referred to as digital cross-border country manuals.
7 advantages of compliance apps
1. Clear guidance
Compliance apps provide users with yes or no answers relating to the restrictions on business activities abroad. They are visual and straightforward and cover countless business scenarios. Compare this to cross-border country manuals, where the static text provides detailed, but general, information about a country and requires interpretation that slows down decision making.
2. Flexible coverage that grows with you
Compliance apps meet growing needs. It’s easy to subscribe to new business scenarios and new countries and add as many users as needed to access the app’s insights. This contrasts with country manuals, where knowledge is not scalable and exploring a new jurisdiction means purchasing a new handbook.
3. Immediate answers despite regulatory complexity
With compliance apps, it takes minutes to get answers on any business activity even in a complex, multiparty, cross-border scenario. With cross-border country manuals, exploring cross-border situations often takes days.
4. Compare cross-border scenarios in real-time
Compliance apps or digital cross-border country manuals enable user-friendly comparisons between different cross-border scenarios in a single view. Easily find out where the circumstances best fit your product or service. Cross-border country manuals do not facilitate the exploration or comparison of scenarios.
5. Knowledge that is always up to date
By using compliance apps, you significantly reduce the risk of missing important regulatory updates – they are automatically applied to the knowledge consumed through the apps. This is a huge improvement over cross-border country manuals, which need to be updated and distributed manually with every regulatory change.
6. Inspire knowledge sharing in business teams
Compliance apps allow users on distributed business teams to access and share compliance insights independently in a few clicks. Keeping up with conversations becomes easy and quick – something unheard of when using paper-based country manuals.
7. Get answers on an instrument level
Compliance apps clarify business activities not only on a country level but also on a specific product level, adding context and providing highly tailored guidance that everyone can benefit from. This is a level of complexity that cross-border country manuals simply can’t deal with.
In conclusion
Organisations that treat regulations not as an afterthought but as a competitive advantage know the value of embedding compliance into everyday tasks. Tools such as compliance apps or digital cross-border country manuals are a factor for speed, accuracy and synergy throughout even the largest financial institutions.