Compliance: What is a Bulletin?
In technology, the only constant is change. Things never stay the same.
The payments industry is a transactional business built on a technology foundation.
Guess what – things are always changing!
Changes to any system or process affect other people, systems and processes. Therefore, it has always been critically important to send out notifications of upcoming changes.
These update and change notifications are called bulletins.
Over the decades that I have been in the payments industry, the challenge has always been HOW to notify affected parties. I still remember my early days in this industry when change notification bulletins would be sent out by whoever was doing the change any time they were making a change.
Those were the worst of times!
There was no standardized format or language in the bulletins as they were sent out by the various departments or teams making the changes.
There was no cadence to the bulletins. They were sent out “as needed”.
Speaking of “as needed”, there were no guardrails forcing the teams sending out the bulletins to give “adequate lead time” for the impacted recipients to make corresponding changes.
I could do a whole miniseries on the battles and soap operas that took us from those days to today!
Today:
Centralized publication teams standardize the format and language of the bulletins.
These same publication teams each have a defined cadence for their bulletin issuance.
Governance and gating procedures have been set at institutional and government levels that impose specific lead times for changes to be communicated to affected parties.
We are in a much better place today than we were “in the good old days”.
However, that doesn’t mean we don’t still have “bulletin adventures” today.