The Value Of “Centralized Specialization” In Compliance Risk Assessments For Credit Unions

The traditional model of compliance review services has always been to randomly select and review documents and compare them to known standards and templates that reflect an optimal version of what that document should look like. But is that enough?

When parents look to best help their children prosper in the world, they rely on much more than a random selection of “documents” to review. The parent uses subject matter experts (also known as teachers) to routinely review and assess a child’s capabilities in a variety of specialty areas such as math, science, social studies, English and physical fitness. The parent then uses a risk rating system (known as the “report card”) to determine how much effort must be put forth to support the child’s improvement in each of these areas.

So what can we learn from this system and apply to the compliance review and support of our credit unions and banks?

Traditional consulting solutions use expensive experts who know all areas of compliance to do their reviews and render their opinions. Yet we know the most effective teachers specialize in their areas of knowledge and that makes them more efficient and effective in the review, support and mitigation of errors made by our children in the classroom.

It’s a model that we’ve implemented here at NeighborBench: we distill compliance down to areas of concentration and use a centralized operations center with subject matter specialists in each area, giving our clients the same advantage of a student who is tutored by specialists in their respective fields. It’s an approach that cannot be reproduced with decentralized compliance review experts who will never support the volume levels to get to that level of sophistication without raising prices.