Compliance. Transformed.

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Shifting compliance activities from having high costs on customer experience, finances and culture to building trust, enhancing resilience with technology and supporting competitive advantage.

In a world where trust is increasingly important, organisations that build credibility throughout their brand, products and services can improve their corporate resilience and relationships with customers, staff and stakeholders

PwC is focused on helping organisations thrive in change - not only by helping to manage their compliance requirements but also helping them stay ahead of risk and regulatory changes and navigating the course forward in times of upheaval.

Is your approach to compliance fit for the future?

Whether across taxation or trade, energy or environment, cyber or safety, the cost of today’s compliance is often one of an organisation’s most significant budget areas.

Insufficient or ineffective compliance can influence an organisation’s overall health through:

  • Compliance failures - major incidents significantly impacting an organisation’s reputation or ability to do business 

  • Compliance burdens - manual, inefficient or otherwise less effective processes that negatively affect customer experience, costs and culture 

Often, these issues can arise as a result of compliance being treated as an obligatory cost of doing business, versus an opportunity to instill trust in stakeholders, and improve competitive advantage and smart risk taking.

PwC has identified 5 Attributes of Highly Effective Approaches to Compliance. Informed through extensive experience with regulatory authorities, as well as internal and external stakeholders, PwC knows what success can look like.

Compliance, Transformed. can help improve the effectiveness of regulatory, legal, IT, financial, tax, trade and other compliance efforts.

The 5 Attributes of Highly Effective Compliance

Compliance can be aligned with strategy, purpose and values, not just laws and regulations

Compliance processes and solutions that are closely aligned to overall business goals are generally more effective in building trust. Here are three practical ways this can be done:

  • First, know the why. Making sure that staff understand both the “why” and “what” behind compliance processes has been shown to increase effective engagement and decrease internal breaches. Start by clearly linking compliance to strategic priorities and risk appetite.

  • The how is important. Staff and customers alike may look to see your organisation’s values and how the company behaves under success and duress. Maintaining consistent behavior starts with building the values of the organisation into all stages of the compliance process.

  • And the where?... compliance is everywhere. Most organisations manage varied compliance obligations across disparate departments and functions and with multiple compliance tools. Confirming each is aligned with overall strategy, purpose and values helps build consistent trust and a great customer and staff experience.

Read more on how compliance transformation can help support business strategy to create value in the PwC Global Compliance Survey 2025.

Explore how company leaders can see, take and manage risk to protect value and power growth, including through compliance, in Global risk services.

 

Compliance processes are designed with the customer in mind to support a differentiated experience

Trust is key to compete effectively and is strengthened through strong, reliable compliance. But how do you make the right choice regarding how to comply? Understanding how these choices affect customers, and their experience engaging with the organisation, can help create a clear path toward driving increased trust and a differentiated customer experience. 

Learn more about how industry ecosystems and customer expectations are changing in PwC's value in motion research. 

Find our how compliance in Consumer Markets is transforming to respond to shifting customer trends. 

Compliance processes are enabled by technology and data

Technology-powered compliance helps increase the bottom line by reducing both the cost of compliance processes and the likelihood of expensive compliance failures. High reliability and efficiency in compliance is more difficult to achieve today without having the technology and rich datasets available to drive these outcomes. From next generation governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) systems, to natural language recognition and advanced analytics, organisations are deploying a wide range of technologies to develop more efficient, automated and effective compliance.

Learn more about AI, data and tech

Compliance processes are built using human-centered design principles, to assist people in driving compliance outcomes

Compliance design, like many aspects of business, can often be positively influenced by leveraging a strong understanding of human behaviour. This can be applied to the process itself to reduce the risk of inadvertent non-compliance, as well as to align staff and organisational goals. Additionally, techniques like behavioural economics can help test and fine tune the effectiveness of processes.

Compliance activities are predictive, preventative and proactive, and not just detective

You may have heard the saying: hard earned trust can take years to develop but a single moment to lose. It follows naturally that preventing compliance failures is always more effective than detecting, investigating and correcting them.  

One of the more common ways these failures occur is through organisations falling behind on emerging regulatory developments. While keeping pace with change can be a challenge for complex multinational organisations, leveraging insight and information from regulatory horizon-scanning tools and third-party databases can help you stay ahead.

The availability of data and technology across the organisation is making the prevention, real time detection and correction of compliance breaches increasingly realistic. 

Through process animation tools and advanced analytics, for example, organisations can observe patterns of behavior, pinpoint potential emerging challenges in processes and detect where the organisation is approaching compliance thresholds. 

Together, these tech-enabled processes simplify staff’s compliance experience, and help protect them from possible breaches, leading to increased internal confidence, and a stronger company culture.

Learn more about how data modelling can transform company's response to risk and compliance and unlock new insights. 

Learn more about how PwC can help your organisation optimise or transform its approach to compliance through a range of related solutions

Thriving in an age of continuous reinvention in PwC’s 2024 Global CEO Survey

Explore PwC’s 28th Global CEO Survey

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Patrice Morot

Patrice Morot

Global Client Partner, Global Risk Services Leader, PwC France

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Shaun Willcocks

Partner, Global Risk Markets Leader, Global Internal Audit Leader, PwC Japan

Tel: +81 (0)90 6478 6991

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Claire Reid

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John Sabatini

Partner, Clients and Markets Leader, Cyber, Risk & Regulatory, PwC US

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Greg Unsworth

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Dr. Robert Paffen

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Rami Feghali

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Darren Henderson

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