Staying compliant to RG 271: The new challenge for Australian Financial Services companies

In Financial Services, staying compliant to RG 271 in your Complaints Management isn't just a “nice to have”.

It's a regulatory mandate being actively enforced by ASIC.

As a result, many Australian Financial Services companies are facing operational and legal hurdles to ensure their complaints-handling processes are compliant.

In this article, we demystify the issues we’re seeing on the front lines of ensuring RG 271 compliance for our customers in financial services.

Does this RG 271 situation sound familiar?

ASIC has defined what rules you need to adhere to in order to achieve RG 271 compliance in the “RG 271 IDR Data Reporting Handbook”.

It’s a grand total of 197 paragraphs - so far...

Here’s how most financial services companies we work with are trying to handle this new compliance requirement:

The middle section of the diagram gives a real picture of just how many resources are involved in RG 271 compliance:

• Spreadsheet/CRM/Tools: You have current tools, whether it's a simple spreadsheet or a popular CRM software
  
  
• Management: Management is responsible for policies and procedures. Plus they allocate staff and have overall accountability over RG 271
  
  
• Staff: Then you have the actual staff that need to be involved. Frontline have to capture complaints, and dedicated IDR teams need to manage, investigate and respond to complaints according to the new rules.
  
  
• QA Process: Plus you've got QA teams that need to monitor this entire operation as a production line to ensure compliance. They have to complete QA using tests, reviews and audits.

The new RG 271 compliance regulations require all of these "components" to be significantly updated, and in sync.

So, RG 271 compliance becomes extremely complex, right?

OK, now let’s switch our focus to the bottom of the diagram…

As a result of all the complexity, we are seeing companies attempting to develop expensive custom features into their CRMs and other software that was never designed for RG 271 complaints management in the first place.

One recent banking customer of ours attempted expensive updates to their CRM environment 3 times to try to accommodate RG 271! After the 3rd failure, they finally reached out to us to get it sorted properly.

What they found through their attempts is that whilst updating and reconfiguring their CRM might kind of do the job of RG 271 compliance, there are too many gaps and issues, such as:

• Creates more and more manual processes which adds to Staff Time.
  
  
• Attempt to develop Auto Compliance into your software, but limited understanding of ASIC RG 271 and low levels of functionality leads to a high error / breach rate
  
  
• Bridging the gap with High Required Skills & training through expensive ongoing Training.
  
  
• Ensure that your compliance solution stays up to date with all ASIC RG 271 updates in the future,

These attempts only make the complexity worse. Not to mention the added Ongoing Costs to manage and maintain compliance to RG 271.

And after all that … Compliance Confidence is still low come audit time.

Does this sound similar to your RG 271 compliance journey so far?

The quadrilemma: Filling all 4 buckets

All of the above can be simplified into 4 competing priorities in your organisation:

• Compliance: You need to be 100% compliant to ASIC RG 271, or you will be fined come audit time.
  
  
• Productivity: You don’t have unlimited staff to “throw at the problem”. You need to stay compliant efficiently, in the long term. This problem is not going away any time soon.
  
  
• Simplicity: The process of RG 271 compliance needs to stay simple. You don’t want to worry about expensive, ongoing staff training. And you’d like to avoid the admin burden (panic!) when it comes time to submit your reporting

But all of this needs to be balanced by one large, overarching priority…

• Cost: The budget for updating CRMs, knowledge and manual staff time will not be endless.

The Complaints Pro Approach

Staying compliant to RG 271 is a $5 million problem.

That’s the amount of R and D time we have spent in developing our Complaints Pro software that keeps financial services companies compliant to RG 271 at all times.

Now that we’ve done all of that leg work, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Complaints Pro has been developed specifically for Financial Services companies to maximise RG 271 compliance, maximise productivity and maximise simplicity.

It seamlessly integrates directly with your current CRM.  Your Frontline staff won’t even know that they are using another system. Plus, simple, self-guided capture forms mean Frontline staff will need ZERO training, they just need to follow their nose, whilst RG 271 compliance is being enforced for them behind the scenes.

And the best part: Complaints Pro stays updated as RG 271 evolves. So you can rest assured that your complaints management data is 100% compliant in real-time.

No ongoing major staff training.

No expensive CRM and software upgrades.

No admin and QA staff burden.

No errors or breaches come reporting time.

Add to that, Complaints Pro is highly customisable and competitively priced.

So all that staff time and budget can be allocated somewhere more useful for the business.

If you’d like to learn more about the features of Complaints Pro and how it works, learn more here and book a demo with our RG 271 experts:
[RG 271 Complaints Management]