Compliance: Why Are Bulletins So Boring?
Plowing through monthly bulletins has to be one of the most tedious boring tasks for a compliance person and anyone else trapped in the same room with them.
Let’s talk about monthly bulletins. . .
Plowing through monthly bulletins has to be one of the most tedious boring tasks for a compliance person and anyone else trapped in the same room with them.
If I would have taken photos in the hundreds of compliance meetings over my career, I would have an incredible library of:
Eyerolls,
People physically present but lost in their laptops or cell phones,
People sleeping (yup – I would have photo evidence!!),
And incredibly bored people.
I think an axiom from pilots flying airplanes applies well to bulletin review meetings:
“Hours of tedium with moments of sheer terror”.
Yes, my photo album would also have a smaller collection of:
Panic-stricken people,
Anger management issues on full display,
Mute shock,
Portraits of sheer terror,
And even tears of frustration.
As I mentioned in the last blog post, in “the old days”, bulletins didn’t have any standardized cadence or language. They were often a shock in timing, and a puzzle in interpretation. The entities publishing bulletins have addressed those concerns. However, in doing so, they have created documents so structured and so rigid in language, they rival legal documents for tedium and obscurity.
That, in itself, can make them brutal to read.
OK, conspiracy theory time.
Even though I spent 26 years working for a major international payment network, I have often wondered if there was a strategy in how convoluted and disconnected fee bulletins and rule change bulletins are.
It’s almost like they don’t want you to be able to connect the dots -
like, “how much is that fee going up?”
or “so, what is the net effect of this rule sentence changing 3 words?”
I have no proof – I have always just wondered. . .
What I can say is that the disconnected way some bulletins are written makes them incredibly tedious and, therefore, boring.
When I receive a fee bulletin, do I really want:
to pull up the billing app on the portal. . .
to see what the current fee is. . .
so that I can do the math of what the new fee will be times the occurrences of that fee. . .
so that I can report that this upcoming fee change will cost us $325.67 extra next year?
Maybe I will just send the bulletin over to the Finance team – they must like doing tedious stuff or they wouldn’t be in finance – right?!
Downstream bulletins, say from your processor, carry a special type of tedium. Often, they will give a short reference to the upstream bulletin that has caused this downstream change – “As required by Mastercard Announcement GLB10607.4, we are making the following changes. . .”
Really?!!
You mean I have to look up that bulletin to make sense of your bulletin?
Thanks!
Enough on that topic – I think I’ve made my point.