I am not an attorney, nor do play one on TV. I do however work with a lot of eDiscovery clients, and occasionally crystallize my thoughts into a blog post.
When you are creating your legal ediscovery content marketing, here is an ongoing big pain point: non-compliance, or the lack thereof.
Banks are particularly sensitive to noncompliance charges, since a good part of their business depends on a trustworthy reputation. Traditionally banks approach compliance by focusing on minimizing risk, reasoning that if they minimize any risk of noncompliance then they’re ahead of the game.
Minimizing risk certainly has an important place in compliance, but banks can only guard against risk if they know what it is. New regulations, massive data growth, and new digital communication channels introduce new risk that the bank may or may not be aware of.
- Defining a high-risk process is not a straightforward process. Many banks define high risk by any impact to revenue in high priority business lines. They may not realize that a less profitable business line may hold higher noncompliance risks. Take a low volume collections process that is barely a blip on the revenue report. In fact, regulators may be quite ready to mount a major investigation for noncompliant collections. How’s that for risk?
- Well-hidden employee malfeasance. A certain banking division may have a vested interest in not investigating risky actions. Remember Wells Fargo? From at least 2011 to mid-2016, Wells employees created more than 1.5 million unauthorized deposit accounts and over half a million unauthorized credit card applications. Senior executives made money and bank stock rose. Apparently, no one at the bank was interested in the risk of a growth rate that was far above the industry norm.
- Even when banks mean to comply, new regulations can catch them by surprise. The United States government alone has passed more than 220 new regulations since 2010, and empowered compliance investigators. (In an ironic example, the last thing that Wells Fargo wanted was more bad publicity. But in December 2016 they were surprised when they ran afoul of Dodds-Frank.)