3 Ways to Conduct Board Compliance Training
In this Compliance Clip (video), Adam provides three different ways to present compliance training to a financial institution’s board of directors. In addition to three different ways for providing board training, Adam gives a few tips that can be used when delivering board training.
NOTE: For those interested in assistance with board compliance training, we have two programs available:
BSA Training for the Board of Directors
Fair Lending Training for the Board of Directors
Video Transcript
The following is a transcript of this video.
In this Compliance Clip, we're going to talk about some tips for conducting compliance training for your board of directors. The question we recently received was, “Do you have any suggestions for changing up our board training as we have basically done the same thing the last few years and don't wanna bore our directors?”
I do have some thoughts on this because training a board of directors is kind of like a tightrope act in one sense. They want it to be quick and efficient, but in the other sense, your examiners expect it to be very comprehensive. So you have to figure out a way to balance both of these acts.
Now, the answer I have for you today is we're gonna look at presentation tips as well as your delivery method. Let's take a look at the presentation tips. When you're conducting training for your board of directors. There are some things you can do like make it comprehensive but keep it short. You'll find with directors that short is sweet and they do like that. So you have to use as few words as possible, but to deliver the content you need to in a very efficient amount of time. Second, it's important to keep it high level. Your directors don't need the weeds, they don't need all the details, they just need the high level pieces so that they know how to manage the piece of compliance that you are talking about. So whether it's Fair Lending or BSA, they need to know what they need to know, and that's about it. They don't need all the details.
Now, something that can make it interesting for your directors is to choose case studies. I've heard where some bankers will use civil money penalties to try to scare directors. I've found that using stories and case studies often help relate it to home, because oftentimes for us in banking and even for directors, we think that the penalties and the fines and the deficiencies are gonna come from large banks. But the reality is that there are problems that happen to community banks and smaller organizations, smaller credit unions, and it's a good idea in order to use some examples. I think using examples is a great way to hit home with your directors.
Something else you can do is to provide tips on what to look for. I personally like to do this. I like to think of my board training as if I were a director, what would I want to know? And I found that that works very well when I'm training directors, especially on regulatory compliance. Finally, you can include a detailed handout, including a detailed handout can sometimes give you the ability to provide that very comprehensive training and that limited window that you want where you provide a detailed handout but you just hit the higher points When you actually go through the training. What you'll find is a lot of directors actually read the handouts from head to toe and somebody goes over the exact handout that they provided. They find it quite boring and sometimes a waste of time. So it can be beneficial to provide more detail than what you actually go over in your meeting. Then you can focus your meeting on the pieces that they absolutely need to know. It's a good tip for presenting to your board of directors.
Now, the second thing I wanted to talk about is your delivery method. You can always consider changing up your delivery method and what a lot of organizations do, whether it's a credit union or a bank, what they will do is they will use in-house training. And what that means is you probably have your compliance officer conducting the training to the board, which is great one year, second year, maybe a third year, but after several years there's only so many words that one person can use and it starts to get repetitive for everybody involved. So in-house training is a good possibility, but you've probably done that. So something that could change it up is you could consider outsourcing this and to hire a speaker or a consultant.
I've actually done many trainings and I've found that having a fresh voice makes a very beneficial change for your directors when it comes to your board compliance training. So that's an option. Another option is you could always utilize a webinar or a video to conduct your board training. Sometimes webinars are an hour and a half and that may be a little bit longer than what you wanted, but there are programs out there that are designed specifically for your board training and are short and sweet and we actually have one of those programs. We have a couple of programs that are designed specifically for your directors. We have programs for both BSA for your directors, as well as fair lending training for the board of directors.
In our program, we include a number of things. We, first and foremost, make sure that they are short and sweet. I think our BSA program runs a little bit longer because it's a little more comprehensive, but they're both well under a half an hour and they deliver what your directors need to know on a very comprehensive level, but in a very short amount of time. We also included our programs tips on what your directors can look for. I think it's very important for your directors to understand what they can do to manage your compliance function. Providing them tips on what to look for is beneficial for them to know how to do their job. Also, we include a comprehensive manual. It's very comprehensive and it outlines everything that's gonna happen and this makes it very beneficial for examiners to see exactly what was trained on.
You can also deliver our programs in a couple different ways. You can deliver it by video by watching the video that we conducted that looks just like this. And I'm the instructor on both of those videos. Or you can use our tools and present it yourself. So our video's actually downloadable, our manual's downloadable and our slides for these board of director training programs are all downloadable. So you can put it on a shared drive and let the directors watch it at home, or you can use the video as a guide for you to present it and utilize our manual and our slides. So there's a number of different ways you can use that.
That is our program. If you're interested in that, you could find it on our website at www.compliancecohort.com/store. That's all I have for you in this Compliance Clip. I hope you found it beneficial.