Let’s face it; every year it’s the same drama when you as a compliance officer have to sit down your colleagues for another round of compliance training. Often considered boring and dull, a check-box exercise or a colossal waste of precious time, experiences range from staff enduring it stoically with little interaction (if delivered personally), distribute the answers between team members to reduce the time spent on a course to the minimum or even pay others to sit it for them (in case of eLearning).
Training is a key aspect in a good compliance regime. It should help protect a firm from harm in the form of enforcement action and make sure that the staff has and maintains the required knowledge and expertise to perform their roles.
However, even with the right culture in a firm in can be difficult to design a training that isn’t a painful experience for both compliance officers and the rest of the firm.
RegTech has been hailed as a potential game changer in many areas of financial institutions like FinTech has already been in the financial industry. Its response is the gamification approach to compliance training: combine an important regulatory topic like Anti-money Laundering with the fun games bring and you may have found the solution to the problem. eLearning games are very popular, so why not use them for compliance training? Through interactivity and enhanced gameplay games can create levels of engagement that traditional approaches are unlikely to ever experience.
However, it’s important thought to get the balance right. We’ve already mentioned an important ingredient to make it compelling, interactivity, but it’s also important that some aspects of the learning objectives cannot be achieved through games alone. However, it helps to playfully learn through trial and error and chances are that content actually sticks with staff. Don’t get me wrong, policies and procedures are important, but how many games and apps have you ever started after thoroughly reading the manual?
Another important aspect of eLearning through gamification is that it provides data that can be used to analyse and determine areas of improvement as detailed as coming up with a specific follow up session, for instance, with that staff member who simply doesn’t get that a client’s rich dad is an influential politician in some dodgy jurisdiction should raise some questions. Of course, the aspect of data collection through games isn’t exclusive as it can be achieved through traditional eLearning courses, too. Chances might be though that it isn’t the summer intern playing the game for everyone else in the bank…