Mandate Compliance: 6 Important Questions
For many companies in the payments space, Compliance is a lot of mystery – and a bit of a monster. Mandates are published and waved around by networks, local regulators, service providers, and by some person who just walked off the street into the office. . .
There’s a lot of noise – and not a lot of continuity between the various mandates – even mandates from the same source. Most companies are frequently trying to make sense out of twenty mandates from five sources with differing compliance dates.
That is a recipe for a multi-day migraine!
How should you handle compliance?
The average company assigns someone, or a team of someones, to “take care of Compliance”.
Now the noise gets louder, but the requirements still don’t seem to make sense. Instead, your technical teams get lists of mandates from your Compliance team that they somehow must solution and code by this October or April. Unfortunately, the people providing the list don’t seem to know the why of the what that is being mandated, nor the impact this will have on your company’s strategic direction and profitability.
It gets very frustrating!
I want to help you make Compliance a constructive and strategically aligned component of your company.
I have just started a video playlist called “Staying Between the Lines – Compliance and Vendor Management”. In the first video, I provided a list of 6 questions. The answers to these 6 questions will help you create a Compliance role that will be effective, efficient, and a partner in advancing your company’s strategic direction.
Here are the questions:
Who is imposing these requirements?
How does this entity have the right to impose these requirements?
What do they have authority over?
Requirements are imposed for a reason – what is the reason?
What teams and infrastructure are impacted by these requirements?
What are the consequences of noncompliance?
The answers to these questions will help shape the mandate of your Compliance team and its interactions with the rest of your organization. It will also give you insight into how you need to manage your outsource partners – addressing their mandate requirements as well as effectively monitoring their compliance solutions and how those solutions align with your corporate infrastructure, processes and strategy.
So, what are the answers to these 6 questions?
After almost 30 years in the payments industry and advising many players in the industry – I can tell you this:
There are guiding principles that are common to almost every player in the payments space. My next video in this playlist will be published 20 Sep 2025. It is called “Comply with What?? Says Who?!!” In that video I will answer these 6 questions. In doing that, I will cover principles I have gathered from my experience of implementing new payment players and guiding experienced participants in the payments industry.
But your answers will also be unique.
I have found that no two shops are the same – even those who use the same outsource partners. Each participant in the payments space I have helped over the years has had unique features. Even if these unique features seemed nuanced, each participant needed personalized solutions to minimize their risk and to maximize their opportunities. Nothing derails Compliance success faster than, “This is what we used to do at my previous employer. . .”