The Role of Data Centralization in Ensuring Corporate Compliance

Data Ownership, Sharing and Collaboration: Navigating the Information Landscape

As organizations expand the size and scope of their operation, they amass extensive volumes of data, including critical information necessary to ensure corporate compliance. Companies that aim to effectively navigate their corporate records need a robust governance framework to address data ownership and ensure data sharing and collaboration among all their entities and teams.

When businesses lack effective solutions for data management, their information becomes siloed among various departments, working with their own documents. If this situation is left unattended, it can have an overall negative impact, including delays and errors in compliance work, inconsistencies in corporate records, subpar decision-making processes and ineffective collaboration.

Companies seeking to optimize their information landscape need to define roles and responsibilities related to data management, establish authorizations for data sharing and access and ensure data standards and quality across the organization. Meanwhile, effective corporate data governance is a prerequisite for breaking down interdepartmental barriers, making data into a business asset and ensuring compliance standards.

Data Accessibility: Advancing Self-Service Solutions

While data governance helps to bring structure to the information landscape, companies need effective solutions to implement data accessibility, sharing and collaboration. These solutions should enable teams to self-service their data needs, including data collection, storage, and filing, promote data accessibility, establish terms of access and sharing and ensure data standards and privacy.

One of the examples of such frameworks is modern entity management systems, which provide for automating corporate records maintenance, filing and compliance work. When teams leverage entity management solutions, they can access all their corporate records instantly from anywhere on any device, collaborating on multiple datasets simultaneously.

Additionally, Implementing modern entity management solutions like Athennian comes with other benefits, including:

• maintaining high quality of data,
• ensuring data consistency across various entities and departments,
• accessing, filing and updating data in real time,
• ensuring data security and privacy,
• managing access rights,
• generating audit trails to track all changes to corporate data.

Most importantly, having an effective entity management framework in place provides organizations with the benefit of having a central source of truth for all their corporate records. By having all corporate data centrally stored and accessible for all teams and entities in real time, organizations can enhance the quality of the compliance work through a proactive approach and ensure high compliance standards.

Centralized Data: Vital for Corporate Compliance

With the ever-growing complexity of the regulatory landscape and the number of new regulations, centralizing data is the only way to provide for corporate compliance and steer clear of potential penalties. When the number of data points that have to be maintained, regularly updated and filed grows exponentially, the compliance teams can no longer rely on siloed processes and disorganized internal databases and need a central repository for all their records to ensure consistency and access.

By centralizing their corporate data with entity management solutions, companies can leverage the functionality of a virtual minute book, where all documents are stored, updated and signed electronically. When corporate records are digitized and centrally located, the teams can speed up approvals and transactions while ensuring a high quality of compliance work.

Other benefits of centralized corporate data for compliance teams include:

• ensuring deadlines through automated processes and reminders,
• maintaining accurate reporting, aided by auto-populated templates and standardizing processes,
• increasing efficiency of compliance work by excluding silos and bottlenecks,  avoiding data duplication and ensuring real-time updates,
• reducing compliance costs for the organization by excluding manual processes, automating routine tasks, and cutting manual errors and inconsistencies.

Simplified Compliance: Centralized Data with Entity Solutions

Entity solutions like Athennian offer the benefit of centralized data management, eliminating the risks of non-compliance through implementing data governance frameworks and maintaining high standards for data ownership, sharing and collaboration. Assisted with self-service technology available with automated entity solutions, the legal, tax, finance and other teams leverage a centralized data repository, providing for simplified compliance and better decision-making.

Modern compliance is a multifaceted endeavor that can only be pursued when assisted with effective tools and digital technology built around existing and future compliance requirements. For more information about streamlining compliance processes, reducing risks and implementing data centralization with technology, please check out the Corporate Compliance Companion Ebook or reach out to the Athennian team for a free consultation and demo.