What is the Most Ingenious or Innovative Thing You Have Done

What is the most ingenious or innovative thing you have done? When I worked as a senior lawyer in Bancolombia in 2019, one of the largest banks in Colombia, my primary role was to act as a leader and protective shield from legal and regulatory compliance risks in the company. At that time, I realized that this company did not have a transparent methodology that would allow alerting the corresponding departments of the company about the new regulations that affected the sector. There was no control over the existing rules, including guidelines, internal policies, and a local and international ruling, such as laws, decrees, and resolutions. Consequently, there were many guidelines and policies without any order, custody, or person in charge of updating them, exposing the company to high legal and regulatory risk, which could have serious consequences. As a result of this situation, I decided to create "ROCKY," an innovative and intelligent tool of Compliance that detects and manages regulatory requirements, identifying and notifying regulatory changes as they are published, in addition, to allowing a review, control, and immediate management of the standards by each of the departments involved. Through this tool, each person in charge could escalate with the Legal Department about legal concerns, and the Legal Department could monitor or audit its implementation. Initially, it was a flow created by me simple and easy, which I started to manage through a shared repository in the cloud with notification and editing tools. However, I decided to seek the board of directors´ approval and obtain a budget to work with a Software Developer who could turn this tool into a more automated system that all employees could use and includes more services. "ROCKY" features included but were not limited to: Daily notification of new regulations Making an informed decision is vitally important, but even more so at the right time. I created the tool with the function of consulting and analyzing, daily and first thing in the morning, the multiple sources of information on financial, tax, criminal, labor, and commercial regulation, as well as sources of information on security and technology issues, Official Gazette, Ministries, Superintendencies, among other pertinent authorities. After making this query, "ROCKY" sent to the departments involved an email notification with a summary of the new regulation and a copy of it so that they could initiate the respective actions. This notification could be in Spanish or English. Repository of standards and search tools Many existing standards, guidelines, and policies serve to slow down the employee's work and the management and updating of this type of document. This tool also included a repository of these documents, with a wise search option, sorting by subject, sub-subject, keyword, or by name, number, date, or issuing body. Assignment of tasks After each department received the rule, the Legal Department assigned, through the tool, specific tasks of review and implementation, with an execution term that was constantly reported and monitored through the same platform. Compliance and Audit With this tool, all the information can be centralized and accessible to anyone who needs it, allowing the completion of matrices, reports, and legal audits. In addition, this tool allows you to review the progress of each rule or policy implementation and provides a Compliance indicator in percentage, allowing you to detect the gaps that must be corrected. Monthly reports The "ROCKY" tool sends a personalized report with all the changes and new regulations to the impacted department. This report allows taking action and preparing the organization promptly for regulatory changes and serves as evidence if you need to certify application, control, and management to an authority. Therefore, with the passing of a few months, the company's employees had become familiar with the use of this tool, which brought many benefits represented in a standardization of the processes, a decrease in the employee's workload, more incredible speed in making decisions, and lower costs for the company in sanctions, among others. The strengthening of processes, for example, in matters of prevention of money laundering (AML), and operational risk, was revealing. The improvement in the company's competitiveness by being more visible in the market and increasing customer confidence was evident results that could leave this tool.