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Modernizing Investigative Case Management Applications to Help Regulatory Agencies Respond Quickly to Change

Scott Dulman
May 1, 2020

For organizations involved in regulations, investigations, and oversight, today's environment is one of constant change and rapidly increasing complexity. Federal, state, and local government agencies must quickly respond to legislative, regulatory, and policy changes and adapt to new federal requirements. Meanwhile, regulatory agencies are challenged by growing caseloads, siloed data, and manual processes. Their legacy systems lack the modern technology that workers need to efficiently find and analyze relevant case information. Furthermore, agencies often discover too late that their COTS packaged applications don't meet their requirements.

Modern case management applications are helping these organizations work more efficiently and effectively. Financial regulators, for example, are modernizing their legacy investigative case management systems with low-code applications. Federal News Network (FNN) recently featured the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS) and its State Examination System (SES) as an example of how the government is reinventing financial regulation with the Appian low-code automation platform.

Dynamic case management applications for government agencies

With Appian, regulatory agencies can quickly implement case management, document management, and correspondence management applications that address their specific requirements. The platform provides a single view of all relevant information across systems and data sources.

Appian dynamic case management combines enterprise process and content management with data navigation and an intuitive interface all working together to support social collaboration and all styles of case work. The case management application's capabilities include case linking, search and retrieval, activity plans, notifications, event monitoring, auditing, messaging, checklists, and templates.

Regulatory agencies can also use robotic process automation (RPA) and robotic workforce management (RWM) to dramatically improve case management processes, productivity, customer experience, and staff engagement. Appian RPA provides organizations with software "bots" that automate high-volume, repeatable tasks within legacy processes and applications, such as cutting and pasting data from legacy systems that lack modern APIs, replying to webqueries, answering routine calls, and responding to common email requests. Appian RWM orchestrates the new, blended workforce of people, systems, and bots.

Investigative case management for financial regulators

Appian's case management application empowers financial regulators to conduct investigations from the office and the field. Its mobile capabilities provide field examiners, investigators, and auditors with the same functionality available to desktop users, including the ability to easily create and update cases from mobile devices. Managers can track department performance and view employee caseload information from their dashboard, supported by real-time reporting and advanced analytics. Supervisors can monitor, prioritize, and reassign all cases and activities based on caseload.

The Appian platform makes it all possible.It provides a single view of all data gathered for each case, integrates with government systems of record, and supports federal reporting and audit requirements, including those from the Office of the Inspector General. Agencies use Appian for compliance and regulatory case management applications in all areas, including:

    • Enqu'tes

    • Examinations

    • Supervision

    • Audits

    • Fraud

    • Risk Management

    • Lutte contre le blanchiment d'argent

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Insights from the Conference of State Bank Supervisors

The delivery, consumption, and regulation of financial services is changing rapidly across the United States. FNN asked two government IT thought leaders how regulators are adapting to this rapidly increasing complexity and change.

Kyle Thomas, vice president for SES Business Services at CSBS, describes how the State Examination System is reinventing financial services supervision. CSBS developed the SES supervisory platform in less than 18 months from initial concept to delivery and in a way that meets the needs of more than 63 regulatory agencies and the thousands of companies that they supervise.

The swift delivery of the SES couldn't have been accomplished without Appian's low-code platform, Thomas said. He explained, "And instead of in the previous development efforts, where we were showing them [state and local regulatory agencies] a lot of wireframes, and even mock ups or static screens, in this low-code environment, we were able to take to that working group direct changes to the system or new functionality based on a conversation that happened just a week ago."

Jason Adolf, industry vice president for the public sector at Appian, talked to FNN about how the Appian low-code automation platform is being used in a variety of oversight capacities. "What's interesting for us, and we see this more and more in our Appian customers, is that we are used by both regulators and the organizations being regulated," Adolf said. "So there are instances where an organization might be using Appian to submit a regulatory filing or document that gets ingested by a government agency using Appian to adjudicate that regulatory submission or filing, which is a very cool nexus of the commercial world and the public sector."

Read the FNN article, "How low-code can help financial regulators adapt to rapidly increasing complexity", to learn more about how regulatory agencies are reinventing financial services supervision.

Join us at Appian World Virtual Edition to learn more

For more success stories and lessons learned, register for Appian World 2020 to hear about digital transformation and IT modernization at the CSBS, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the U.S. Air Force. You'll also have an opportunity to see government investigative case management, DevSecOps, acquisition management, and grants management application modernization demonstrations. Appian World is free, on-demand, and live May 12-13.