How a Well-known Creditor’s Rights Firm Streamlines Audit & Compliance and Gains Visibility Across OrganizationCompliance Management
A well-known multi-state creditor’s rights firm representing various local, regional, and national businesses, including several publicly traded entities and some of the nation’s largest lenders, partnered with Provana to gain visibility and increase efficiency across the audit and compliance ecosystem with an automated compliance management solution.
Challenge
Representing top national lenders and numerous other businesses in the financial sector with legal services demands following rigorous audit and compliance processes. The firm wanted to redesign their internal audit and compliance functions to keep up with the increasing regulatory scrutiny and clients’ audit requirements. They tried to find ways to spend less time organizing and managing SOPs and policies across departments and be prepared for annual audits while reducing process inefficiencies and gaining better visibility across the organization.
Before switching to Provana’s compliance management solution, the firm housed hundreds of SOPs and policies on their network or shared drives. Employees could not search and find updated information because of the siloed system. The documents were scattered and duplicated in multiple folders and were very difficult to manage and track across the departments.
The firm needed their staff to acknowledge the updates in the documents or take tests and certify themselves on the new policies and SOPs annually per their clients’ audit and compliance requirements. Their earlier learning management system (LMS) did not have automated alerts, and the admins had to renew the tests for individuals manually every time. Doing this for 80+ tests and certifications was time-consuming and inefficient.
For managing security audits of the vendors, they used to track the expiring documents manually, email the vendors for the evidence and capture the responses in the spreadsheets that would require a lot of following up and time-consuming. They needed the necessary resources to qualify these more technical responses and send the remediation.
Solution
Provana’s IPACS, an automated compliance management solution, helps the firm store about 600 SOPs, 80 policies, and audit evidence from 20+ vendors in one place, ensuring the updated documents are easily accessible to all their staff for acknowledgment and tracked for attestation across the organization. A centralized system provides continuous visibility and control of the processes.
During annual client audits, the firm uses IPACS to put together the audit evidence per the client questionnaires. Having all documents housed and managed in a single location makes it easy for them to comply with every audit requirement. Provana’s audit services have improved their vendor audit process on IT security parameters and other compliance areas. With Provana’s experienced and certified experts, the steps of qualified reviewing of responses, sharing the remediation, tracking vendor oversight, and modifying the audit questionnaire to accommodate the technical aspects of the Security audits become seamless for the firm. Getting an alert on the expiring documents eliminated the manual tracking process.
With Provana’s built-in training and testing offering, the firm addresses their ongoing and extensive cross-departmental certifications and training needs. Automated alerts notify the staff of relevant departments about the changes in policy and procedures, and they can log into the system to complete their tests or acknowledgments. Also, IPACS lets the administrators renew their tests automatically for every staff member annually per their clients’ audits. It saves the administrators considerable time and manual work to focus on more critical issues.
Results
Partnering with Provana helped the creditor’s rights firm organize their policies and processes while making the approval workflow more transparent. With a centralized system, their training, certifications, and preparedness for annual client audits became much more efficient. Some of the impacts are the following:
- Better visibility of documents and workflows for multiple stakeholders across the organization
- Ease of access, expertly managed vendor audits, and centralized audit evidence saved time and increased efficiency by 75% during annual audits
- Automated training and certifications increased compliance and provided better utilization of time for the administrators
Restructured
Policy management and Internal compliance
75%
Increase in operational efficiency of Audit processes
Holistic View
By removing information silos across the organization
“Our team has experienced an elevation in efficiency and organization with IPACS, we continue to find ways to customize it to our needs and the analytics provides us with a better picture of our status in training vendor management and other compliance areas.”
