Starting Your Data-Driven Compliance Journey

Our previous article explored why compliance teams need a data-driven approach to thrive in today's complex regulatory landscape. We discussed how real-time data empowers teams to shift from reactive to proactive, reducing risk and increasing agility. However, understanding the need for change is only the first step. The real challenge lies in implementing that change—transforming your team's processes to effectively gather, analyze, and respond to compliance data.

Implementing a data-driven strategy doesn't require an immediate, large-scale transformation. The key to success lies in starting small, managing expectations, and building momentum over time. By focusing on incremental improvements and collaborating with teams already embracing data, you can create early wins that lay the groundwork for broader, more impactful changes.

Start with Teams Already Using Data

One of the most effective ways to introduce a data-driven compliance strategy is by partnering with departments accustomed to working with data—such as risk management, IT, or product teams. These groups already use data to inform decisions and can demonstrate the value of real-time data collection and analysis within compliance.

However, it's crucial to avoid relying solely on these teams to own your compliance data processes. While collaboration is vital, long-term success hinges on your compliance team's ability to manage its own data needs. This balance ensures compliance retains control over its workflows while benefiting from the expertise of data-centric departments. Self-sufficiency won't happen overnight, but making it an early goal sets the stage for a sustainable, data-driven compliance model.

By balancing collaboration with internal capability-building, compliance teams can gradually take ownership of their data processes. This positions them to adapt quickly to regulatory changes without becoming overly dependent on other departments.

Focus on Early, Manageable Wins

While the ultimate goal of a fully data-driven compliance program is ambitious, success depends on starting small. Instead of attempting a comprehensive overhaul, focus on manageable, high-impact projects that can demonstrate value quickly. These "early wins"—such as automating data collection for a single product line or regulatory requirement—showcase the approach's efficacy without overwhelming your team or stakeholders.

For example, by streamlining data collection for a specific compliance process, you create a success story that clearly illustrates the benefits of a data-driven approach. As these early projects deliver measurable improvements, your organization can build on that foundation, gradually expanding the scope of your data-driven efforts.

Expanding Data Collection: What to Prioritize in the Long Term

While starting small is essential, long-term success relies on strategic expansion. As your organization matures in its data-driven approach, the goal should be to collect everything that holds significance for compliance. Here's a roadmap for expanding data collection over time:

Key compliance steps in end-user experiences: This includes actions like identity verification, consent acknowledgments, and transaction approvals across all customer interactions—whether through web, mobile, or phone-based systems.
Backend processes with compliance implications: Compliance isn't just about the customer-facing side. Collecting data from backend workflows, financial processes, or automated decisions ensures a comprehensive view of your compliance landscape.
Internal alerts and signals: Automated system alerts or signals from compliance officers that detect anomalies should be tracked. These serve as early warnings, helping to identify potential risks before they escalate.
Transactions: This is critical in banking. Logging each stage of every transaction—authorization, approval, and settlement—ensures compliance at every touchpoint.
State changes in key entities: Compliance often hinges on understanding changes over time, such as customer updates, device registrations, or shifts in relationships (e.g., adding authorized users). Capturing these changes is essential for effective compliance oversight.
Data from partner systems: For financial institutions, data from partner platforms is vital. Ensuring these activities are captured helps maintain compliance across third-party relationships.

This broader vision for data collection will allow your compliance team to act proactively and be ready to adapt as regulations and business needs evolve.

Demonstrating ROI and Building Trust Through Early Success

Implementing a data-driven compliance strategy requires organizational buy-in, and the most effective way to build this support is by demonstrating measurable ROI early on. By collaborating with data-centric teams and focusing on small, impactful projects, you can showcase quick wins—such as reducing time spent on manual processes, improving the accuracy of compliance reports, or speeding up audit responses.

One key metric is your team's ability to self-service its data needs. Track how long it takes to service requests from external auditors, and aim to respond in under 5 minutes for key datasets. You can categorize response times into buckets (e.g., 0-5 minutes, 5-30 minutes, 30 minutes to 1 hour) to identify what's working well and where improvements are needed. This metric helps demonstrate control over your compliance data while pinpointing areas where latency persists.

Additionally, track metrics like the number of compliance reports your team generates independently versus those requiring external help from IT or other departments. These metrics can show growing independence and highlight progress toward building internal data capabilities.

In real-world cases, compliance teams struggle with data delays during regulatory exams. For example, gathering data from a banking partner can take over 7 days, which is common. Worse still, some teams spend 1-2 months collecting data during an exam—an inefficient process that causes significant strain. By adopting a data-driven approach, these teams can reduce dependency on external sources and accelerate compliance responses.

Leveraging Existing Tools: Looker, Tableau, Power BI, and Beyond

It's also important to look at the tools your colleagues in risk management, IT, or product teams are already using for data warehousing and analysis. Tools like Looker, Tableau, and Power BI have become popular in other departments, and some compliance teams have seen success with them. However, one common challenge is self-service—many compliance professionals still need half a day to rework exported data in Excel before they're comfortable sharing it in a report. This often results in delays and inefficiencies despite having access to powerful analytics platforms.

By focusing on improving self-service capabilities and streamlining data workflows, compliance teams can move from simply collecting data to generating actionable insights efficiently. Automating this process improves speed and frees up your team to focus on higher-value tasks, such as proactively identifying risks rather than being bogged down by manual data wrangling.

These early wins build credibility with executives, managers, and other teams by showing that a data-driven approach leads to tangible improvements—whether it's faster audit response times, reduced manual effort, or better reporting accuracy. As these successes accumulate, they build momentum, making securing further support for expanding your data-driven compliance initiatives easier.

Creating a Snowball Effect

Once early wins are secured, momentum will build. The key to long-term success is planning for this snowball effect, where each success leads to greater buy-in and more significant results. As your data-driven approach expands, you'll unlock cumulative benefits, with insights from one area of compliance helping streamline others.

Moreover, as regulations change or your business grows, your data-driven model will be well-positioned to adapt quickly. This ongoing agility ensures that your compliance team remains proactive, always staying ahead of the curve.

Keeping the Long-Term Vision in Focus

While starting with small, achievable wins is crucial, it's equally important to maintain a long-term vision for your data-driven compliance strategy. Compliance is an ongoing process, not a one-time initiative. Regularly evaluating and refining your systems ensures they scale as your organization grows and regulations evolve.

Taking the First Step Toward Proactive Compliance

Ultimately, transitioning to a data-driven compliance strategy is about making your organization proactive and efficient. Instead of reacting to issues after the fact, data empowers compliance teams to identify and address risks as they emerge. By starting small and building trust through measurable successes, your organization can fully embrace the power of real-time, data-driven compliance—transforming your approach and equipping your team to meet today's challenges while anticipating tomorrow's regulatory demands.

Ready to Embrace the Future of Compliance?

At ComplyCo, we've built a real-time compliance observability tool to help teams easily navigate the evolving regulatory landscape. Our platform captures critical compliance data from user experiences and backend processes and analyzes it against our up-to-date knowledge of laws and regulations. This functionality enables your compliance team to act in real-time, ensuring you're always one step ahead of potential risks.

If you're ready to transform your compliance operations and embrace a data-driven future, contact us today to learn more or request a demo of ComplyCo's observability platform.