ShapardResearch's mystery shopping identifies compliance vulnerabilities for financial institutions

To help Oklahoma financial service companies comply with changing industry regulations, ShapardResearch's mystery shopping program now includes a solution that detects potential noncompliance and reduces the risk of incurring penalties or fines.The new solution offers an independent assessment to help banks, credit unions, or other financial institutions in the state proactively monitor compliance with regulatory processes and procedures when dealing with existing customers and prospective customers. For customer-facing situations during which employees explain opening a checking account or respond to a question about overdraft fees, ShapardResearch alerts management to risks. Additionally, ShapardResearch's mystery shoppers, who are hand-picked, trained and supervised employees of ShapardResearch, audit for compliance vulnerabilities and give clients the opportunity to make immediate improvements.The program specializes in tracking regulatory issues related to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Truth in Lending Act, the Truth in Savings Act, mortgage reform and investor protections. It offers different assessments for specific needs, which are tracked and managed through ShapardResearch's online reporting portal, including: reviews of disclosures in various communications and marketing materials and in-person mystery shopping visits to branch staff, telephone calls to customer call centers and online communications.ShapardResearch's online dashboard is designed to provide timely access to mystery shopping results, including quick identification of non-compliance issues through "Alert Notices" to various levels within the company, including compliance officers, individual bank presidents, and call center managers. The dashboard also offers the ability to view trends over time and segment the data by regulation, location, situation, level of the organization or expected behavior.For more information about ShapardResearch's mystery shopping compliance monitoring program, feel free to call or email me anytime, at (405) 607-4664 or bill@shapard.com.