What is Regulatory Intelligence and Compliance?

Regulatory intelligence is the synthesis of new private and publically available information for the development of strategies to meet shifting regulatory developments.

AI-powered tools, like Visualping, help regulatory intelligence professionals monitor changes in laws, policies and legislation, to help ensure their company’s compliance.

What is Regulatory Intelligence?

“An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

That’s Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. To understand what regulatory intelligence is, a distinction first needs to be made between regulatory information, intelligence and compliance.

Regulatory information is the raw private and publically available data that’s researched and monitored by regulatory intelligence professionals.

Regulatory intelligence is active. Beyond data management, it’s the analyzing and synthesizing of private and publicly available information, including communicating the implications of that information, for assimilation into company procedures. Regulatory intelligence professionals perform various impact analyses to develop compliance strategies relevant to the business’s operations, such as product approvals, to make sure the company keeps up with changing legal expectations. It’s about having a proactive approach to changes in the regulatory environment, rather than reactive.

Regulatory intelligence does not just influence internal operations. It can impact the external environment, too. Regulatory pProfessionals monitor the landscape to influence future regulations, guidelines, policy and legislation, which can also help the company foster a competitive advantage in its field.

What is Regulatory Compliance?

Professionals monitor regulatory changes to maintain compliance. Regulatory compliance is when a company monitors and adheres to state, federal, and international laws and regulations as part of its operations. The requirements depend largely on the industry and company but, regardless, companies are legally required to comply with certain laws and regulations related to its operations.

The last decade has seen a drastic increase in online information. AI-powered tools are increasingly used to help regulatory intelligence professionals keep track of the ever-shifting landscape (See above example of an email alert from Visualping, notifying the user of updates from the House Committee on Energy & Commerce). AI tools help professionals efficiently stay on top of requirements for global clinical trials, compliance procedures, manufacturing requirements, advice personnel, as well as to answer strategic regulatory questions and to develop international marketing agendas.

Regulatory compliance requires a targeted view of the global regulatory climate, so teams can act quickly to determine the best course of action.

Regulatory Intelligence: Monitor, Analyze and Action

Regulatory intelligence encompasses 3 components: monitoring, analysis and taking strategic action.

1. Monitoring Regulatory Changes

The first step is to monitor the regulatory climate for changes in law, policies and regulations the company needs to be aware of. Professionals conduct a breadth of research about regulatory norms as per a particular product in a particular geography.

But it’s an overwhelming list, the sources online to check for your research: newsletters, announcements, trend data, guidance documents, websites, consultation papers, FOI Requests, warning letters, regulatory emails and seminars and training sessions. The list goes on.

That’s why, to efficiently track information and be alerted of changes, regulatory professionals use various online regulatory intelligence and compliance tools to make the research and monitoring easier and quicker.

An example is website change detection tools, like Visualping.io. Visualping continuously crawls web pages for changes in regulatory information, and sends you real-time email alerts when regulatory changes occur. Instead of having to manually look up content for changes, Visualping automates the process of checking the content for you.

2. Analyzing Regulatory Information

The data then needs to be filtered and processed for relevancy, and analyzed for the latest trends and industry patterns.

Regulatory professionals play a crucial role in strategizing the development, approval and maintenance of company products, as well changes to regulations impacting the global regulatory landscape.

Effective regulatory intelligence encourages proper planning within various disciplines of the company, from manufacturing to marketing.

Some regulatory intelligence tools include features to help filter the data for relevance.

Visualping’s Keyword Alerts feature lets companies monitor web pages for certain keywords. Filter out the noise and receive email alerts page changes that only contain keywords of interest.

The information usually goes through various modifications to filter out irrelevant data and screen out the actionable items.

3. Synthesizing for Actionable Items

This is the output stage of regulatory intelligence. Often a matter of internal dialog within the company, regulatory intelligence and compliance professionals need to determine the most appropriate and practical strategy for the company.

Different products have different regulatory guidelines in different countries. Experts need to propose a plan of action that outlines how the business will effectively respond to shifts in the regulatory climate for the target distribution markets.

As regulatory norms continue to evolve over time, strategizing effective responses is a continuous and ever-changing process.

Why You need Regulatory Intelligence and Compliance Tools

Regulatory intelligence quickly becomes tedious and complex. It’s not just challenging to follow shifting laws, policies and regulations in targeted sectors, but identifying the most practical and efficient strategies, as well.

To easily and efficiently track information and be alerted of changes, regulatory professionals use online tools, like Visualping, to automate the monitoring process and be alerted of changes, as opposed to manually checking themselves.

Visualping assists many law and consultancy firms, for example, responsible for monitoring the regulatory climate to quickly and strategically support their clients.

Users can adjust their monitoring to specifically track textual changes, like changes to Terms and Conditions Agreements (T&Cs). Users can also monitor visual page elements, PDFs, and check web pages as often as 5 minutes.

But as well as regulatory intelligence, businesses also use Visualping as a competitive monitoring tool, to produce competitive intelligence. For more on this, check out our blog post what is competitive intelligence?.

Visualping offers several individual and business subscription plans for high frequency monitoring.

Conclusion

Regulatory intelligence is the act of gathering and analyzing regulatory information, communicating its implications and synthesizing the data into actionable items for the company.

Regulatory compliance is when professionals adhere to shifting state, federal, and international laws and regulations as part of its operations.

But keeping up with the data is challenging, and extensive research and analysis demands both time and resources.

For more information about Visualping as a regulatory intelligence and compliance tool, contact us at corporate@visualping.io.