Compliance has always been high stakes, but it seems that the pressure has been cranked up in recent years. With compliance teams facing greater workloads and more complexity than ever, burnout has become an increasingly prevalent problem.
Businesses that take a proactive approach to preventing compliance team burnout can benefit from reduced staff turnover, increased morale, and ultimately better compliance outcomes. After all, an exhausted compliance team is a liability.
In this post, we’ll outline why compliance teams are increasingly experiencing burnout, as well as run through the steps leading firms are taking to address the issue.
There’s More Volume Than Ever
From customer checks and transaction reviews to onboarding and ongoing monitoring, compliance teams have more on their plates than ever, and they’re typically having to complete these cases with the same headcount as before. That leads to more stress, more backlogs, and more errors.
The solution isn’t just to hire a few more employees. It’s to change how the compliance team works in the first place. In this day and age, there are AI tools that can handle many of the repetitive, admin-focused tasks, freeing up the employee’s time to work on the value-adding tasks.
Everything Requires Context
The expertise of compliance officers is seen when they have to make decisions, but before they can reach that stage, they often have to gather a significant amount of information, often from multiple sources. In some cases, such as in the case of complex clients, this can take days — or even weeks. That’s a significant amount of time and energy to be spent on a task that has nothing to do with actual analysis, which is where compliance officers excel.
The key information is vital for building context, but the task doesn’t need to be performed by the officer. Instead, AI tools can do it on their behalf. With AI for compliance in banking, compliance officers can get the full picture of a customer without having to do the legwork themselves. Instead, they can focus on actually reviewing, not researching, which is a much better use of their time.
False Positives Can Wear People Down
A decent amount of flagged cases turn out to be nothing. While that sounds good for the organization, it can be a drain for compliance officers, who have to investigate but ultimately end up having done so for no reason. AI tools can help differentiate the real issues from the false positives, allowing teams to focus on the cases that actually require their expertise.
It’s Hard to Find Compliance Experts
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find compliance experts. With competition fierce, the very best often find themselves with a pick of jobs — and when they leave an organization, they leave a gap behind in the rest of the team. If they’re not adequately replaced, which is increasingly difficult to do, then the remaining employees can find themselves under increased pressure. For this reason, leading organizations are taking a proactive approach to investing in employee retention, decreasing the chance that employees will leave.
