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By Miriam McCoull Head of Complitech, ComplianceOne Group
Compliance is key in today’s fast paced gambling industry. In 17 years of experience, I have seen what works and what doesn’t. By following simple best practices, you can ensure compliance and stay ahead of any regulatory changes. This article will provide you with some tips and strategies that can help you achieve technical excellence in compliance through regulatory changes, market entry, market comparison and more. Let’s get started!
Best practices for Regulatory Change
If you want to maintain high standards in technical compliance, you should be constantly on the lookout of regulatory changes. No one wants to admit to upper management that they missed a major change which could have a negative impact on operations or sales, or be subject to regulatory action. You should consider putting these practices into practice in order to avoid costly mistakes.
Assign an individual or team to be responsible for monitoring regulatory compliance. The staff must be familiar with all the regulations and requirements for compliance and have the ability to stay up-to-date. Next, identify the authorities who oversee iGaming or Betting in the countries where you are operating or plan to operate. After identifying the relevant authorities, you can set up clear communication lines and keep updated through their websites, social media channels and newsletters. Complitech Compliance Monitor, a service that keeps you updated on developments based upon your market preferences is another complementary strategy.
Monitoring isn’t the end. Once you have the information and the changes, it is important to understand the impact on your product offerings and operations. By mapping modifications to baseline standards and internal control systems, you can easily assess new compliance risks and determine the importance of the impacted components.
You will also need to create a roadmap and action plan with dates that coincide with the implementation date. This strategy must address the compliance risks identified, as well as the controls required to reduce the risks and ensure continued compliance. Updates to products, recertification and approvals as well as policies, processes and procedures are all common. Updates to key documentation are a common but difficult task. !
Market entry best practices
You already know that there are many keys to a successful entry into the market. A multi-functional team made up of members from key departments will ensure that all the actions necessary for a successful market entry are identified and resolved quickly.
You should maintain a constant relationship with the regulator to clarify any laws, regulations and guidelines that may be unclear. The regulator and the regulatory framework often allow for interpretation. Remember that communicating with them in their preferred language and through the means they prefer can help you obtain the information you need! You may still be confused if you have not received any answers. Consult professionals who specialize in technical and regulatory compliance. You should then use a technology solution to convert the requirements into a compliance obligation register once you’re sure you understand them. You can quickly distribute internal terms before proceeding to perform a high-level gap assessment and evaluate the business cases. By converting the checklists into a format accessible to all employees, you can use them as the basis for an internal audit.
The next step in entering the market is to develop an action plan or roadmap that outlines all of the steps to be taken to launch on the market. This includes product modifications, new guidelines and procedures, information security audits and pre-release compliance checks, as well as regulatory approval. In order to maintain market presence and prepare for launch, it is important to adhere to ongoing technical compliance. Plan how you will manage product changes, incidents, and ongoing compliance checks, inspections etc. in a way that is compliant. It is easy to forget this, but if you don’t prepare you will have a lot of headaches in the early stages of launching a product.
Market comparison best practices
Benchmarking is another best practice. This involves using technology to compare new market obligations and the markets that you are familiar with. You can then compare the requirements of new markets with those you already know and comply with.
After determining which markets you want to compare, the easiest way to achieve this is by creating a list with all of the required information arranged according to product verticals and regulatory areas. It is easier to compare market requirements side-by-side in order identify similarities and differences. Next, analyze the similarities between the requirements to determine the impact of the differences on the business. Which of the requirements can you say you are currently in compliance with and which require risk assessment and mitigation, for example? You may be lucky and find that your product is very similar to others on the market, and you don’t need to make major changes. You might also have to do a lot of work to develop new features for responsible gaming or to create a data vault so that regulators can access the data.
You should develop a plan for both similarities and differences, no matter how large or small your business is. A detailed plan will give you and your business confidence that the products, policies or processes are compliant and can open up new revenue streams.
Conclusion
Compliance is not an effort that can be done once. Staying on top of changes, gathering requirements and understanding the impact requirements have on your products is crucial. You can do this by investing heavily in an internal team, or external support, as well as adopting some of these regulatory intelligence products, such as Vixio and Complitech. These products will help you save money, time, and headaches.
