More than ever, compliance is a high priority for digital-first organizations that operate across regions. Every market has its expectations, cultural considerations, and standards; whether it’s the European GDPR or Asia’s data sovereignty acts or the United States of America’s consumer privacy act, compliance should be on every digital-first organization’s radar. Those failing to comply with industry regulations face fines, lost customers and the quickest way for any organization to fail is through negative public perception and lost revenue. Compliance is integrated and effective across the enterprise through content governance. Headless CMSs empower organizations to foster compliance naturally through content workflows enterprise-wide. With modular content structures, content-driven processes, and quality control determinants throughout the organization, compliance can be achieved at scale without losing time and resources in increasingly competitive, global marketplaces.
Why Compliance Is Important When Doing Business Internationally
Failing to comply internationally comes at too great a cost. With regulators more and more aggressive in an increasingly digital world, everything from failing to appropriately use customer data to false advertising can cost a company millions in proposals. Enterprise headless CMS by Storyblok helps organizations navigate these challenges by providing structured governance and compliance-ready frameworks. But it’s not even the financial cost to a company that should make compliance a top priority. Over time, failure to comply can be more detrimental to a brand as customers realize that companies do not legitimately care about their privacy or what legal actions are required of them.
Therefore, the threat of international exposure is compounded by the reality that just because something works in one market does not mean it won’t provide a legal loophole in another. Content governance gives organizations the assurance that their digital presence and digital offerings are compliant, vetted across multiple regulations, before going live. It decreases international exposure, maintains customer trust, and allows compliance to be a launchpad for international growth instead of a stoplight.
How Structured Content Helps Compliance Happen
Historically, compliance has been a reactive process. However, by using structured content, organizations can create compliance as a proactive design element. Instead of waiting until the end to ensure appropriate disclaimers and regulatory elements are done, it needs to happen at the level of content models. For example, no matter what language a pharmaceutical ad is created in, it needs a disclaimer about side effects; content governance allows for this disclaimer to exist as metadata, content type ingredient, or something similarly coded so that it happens across the board. When content can be broken down into reusable chunks, it simultaneously allows teams to take global operations and customize what it needs without redundancy. Therefore, if a disclaimer is needed for the European market, it can be baked into the overall editorial experience so that it shows up every time it needs to remove human error and editorial opinion.
How International Compliance Standards Can Differ Yet Be Aligned With Structured Governance
One of the biggest challenges when managing content globally is being able to do so with international goals in mind while still addressing localized law variances. Just because something is okay here doesn’t mean it’s okay elsewhere and vice versa. Content structured governance allows for companies to keep elements similar while allowing for legal nuances where appropriate. For example, an international investment banking firm can govern what an investment disclosure looks like across all markets but then narrow what it says in specific countries to meet legal requirements without losing control or brand standards. This empowers centralized teams and legally compliant decision-makers to champion universal integrity while supporting regional operations in showing authority. With content structured governance, a company doesn’t have to choose between localization or standardization; it can have both at once.
Compliance Built Into the Publishing Process
Compliance doesn’t just occur because certain rules exist; compliance occurs when compliance is built into the publishing process. With a headless CMS, compliance can be baked in via role-based access permissions, multi-step approval processes, and pre-publication audits. For example, requiring a legal or compliance officer as part of an approval process is a mandated step that ensures specific reviews take place prior to publishing any sensitive material. Everything from creation to edits to approvals to publishing is tracked and logged, providing an audit trail that shows compliance efforts made. When compliance is part of the process rather than a remembrance project of compliance rules where people have to recall what’s needed it’s integrated into the day-to-day publishing operations of content creation, and it supports a culture of responsibility while minimizing human error.
Automation Makes Compliance Possible
Manually checking for compliance is a resource-intensive, time-consuming process full of human error; meanwhile, a global brand may have thousands of assets requiring compliance checks. The only way compliance can occur at scale is through automation. Although a content model with structure sets the groundwork upon which compliance can exist, compliance can go even further with validation. Automated tools can assess for misnaming of assets, misapplied metadata attributes, or even incorrect disclaimers prior to approval. APIs can assess activity as an example, blank fields must be filled in for required questions. A cookie consent disclaimer can default automatically to the page for every page created; accessibility requirements can be validated through programming. Automation saves valuable time away from hands-on efforts, allowing for expedited turnarounds without sacrificing quality and consistency. Finding the intersection between speed and sustainable quality is especially important for brands looking to scale globally.
Foster Transparency and Accountability No Matter Where Your Teams Are Located
Compliance is a byproduct of a process in distributed organizations. Compliance requires transparency. A formalized governance of content allows for accountability because where there is transparency, there is visibility across the content lifecycle. Tiers of content creation and usage will know who authored the piece, who vetted it, and who provided the final yes to publish it. Being able to audit everything not only provides outside regulators with confidence that compliance was properly executed, but also provides internal leadership with confidence that the organization can handle itself with proper content creation abilities.
Moreover, accountability encourages cooperation. Teams in the global marketplace know their responsibilities will not be ignored by regional teams because the governance system is keeping track. Regional teams know what to verify because it’s visible what global teams have done. Giving everyone the power to control content responsibilities and acknowledgment ensures that compliance is a team effort, not isolated to silos.
Compliance Access to Content Lifecycles for Everyone Around The Globe
Compliance doesn’t end when content is published. In many regulated industries, compliance extends to managing the entirety of a content lifecycle to support compliance. Certain content needs to be removed to ensure customers are not overloaded with stale information. For example, a consumer comes to a financial institution for a mortgage loan. If they publish a piece discussing 10-year mortgages and three years later, they no longer offer that option, that content must be removed so as not to confuse future consumers. Likewise, some content needs to be archived. A healthcare publication may require a healthcare organization to keep it for a period of time to ensure they never mislead patients or regulators. A formalized content governance structure allows for triggers and automated means to remove and archive the content that needs it when it needs it. Central teams dictate the time frames and permitted actions for the global mandate while regional teams operate under their own restrictions. Either way, the lifecycles are managed holistically from every perspective.
Prepare for New Regulations Before They’re Required and When Markets Change
Regulations enacted this year may not be relevant next year, but organizations must prepare for both anticipated changes and the unknown. For example, emerging markets pass new data privacy regulations as established markets broaden regulations to include artificial intelligence, accessibility requirements and advertising in newly regulated spaces. If they can anticipate the potential for change now and apply it worldwide, it’s far better than waiting until a new regulation is passed and then disseminated. With a structured content governance in place, organizations can use compliance as competitive differentiation because keeping compliance isn’t too difficult to maintain. Compliance can be monitored from a centralized location and leveraged through content models so that one effort can be completed once and pushed out globally with relative ease. Compliance is no longer the obstacle to innovation but instead, a realistic endeavor that can be achieved without great costs or distraction.
Trust Born from Compliance
Compliance isn’t just about avoiding fines. It’s about trust. Consumers are savvier than ever about how and when their data is captured held and used. Brands that acknowledge the error of their ways and provide a more informed transparency and accountability stance about their content are trusted and credible. Content governance gives brands the ability to ensure privacy alerts, consent requests, and plain language are featured throughout the digital experience, making trust factors part of every engagement. Therefore, customer experiences are compliant and comforting for consumers. Compliance has never been more a practice-influencing goal with trust as the compliance-derived payoff.
Compliance Is an Element of the Localization Process
Localization allows brands to scale internationally, but compliance gets more challenging on a global scale; different languages and cultural expectations might need specific disclosures, policies for that region, or terminologies that need changing. With content governance in a measured way, compliance travels with localized content so gaps don’t occur. When regulatory compliance must occur during translation and localization efforts, it safeguards the brand at every step.
Compliance With Third-Party Contributors
When organizations go global, they often work with other agencies in various locations or bring on regional partners or freelance contributors. Without compliance measures in place, those third-party entities might publish through organizational channels without awareness or unintentionally add to content that goes against compliance restrictions. A headless content management system provides the compliance and governance safeguards within the enterprise so permissions, approvals, and auditing trails go with any linked third-party contributor. As a result, assets created by contributors follow the same digital content regulations as those created by internal teams to mitigate the vulnerabilities that open publishing efforts can cause.
Compliance Cost Center vs. Governance Value Add
Compliance is a cost center until governance gives it value. Avoiding fines and lawsuits is the baseline; a compliance structure reduces redundancies, speeds up time-to-market, and maintains customer trust. When content teams can demonstrate how much lower error rates mean clients gain approval quicker and branded reputations are bolstered by reliable compliance policies, operations see true ROI from a governance structure. Compliance becomes an avoid-at-all-costs nuisance instead of a governance value add that provides revenue opportunities.
AI Plays a Role in Governance Going Forward
The more complex the compliance, the more complex the need for AI to support enterprise-scale compliance. AI tools can already scan content for inappropriate language, verify all mandatory metadata is included, and flag potential compliance issues before human teams take a look. But with a content governance process established, human oversight occurs first before compliance is live. Should regulatory requirements outpace human time and attention, enterprises will need to rely on such levels of automation.
Accessibility is Compliance-Required
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the European Accessibility Act demonstrate that accessibility is compliance, required, not optional. A structured content governance plan enables accessibility to be a check mark instead of an afterthought in the first place. By allowing for modeling of content that demonstrates fields for alt text, semantic hierarchies, and reading level requirements, they ensure that digital content and experiences are accessible and compliant internationally.
Conclusion
Compliance on an international scale requires more than simple, reactionary efforts. Enterprises must assess the need to structure content governance for compliant resiliency and scalability. From modular content modeling to automated onboarding of compliance checks to discerning whether regionalized requirements are more feasible than global compliance approaches, enterprises can achieve compliance at scale with the right considerations. Clarity and delineation foresee who is responsible for what, while lifecycle compliance and flexibility position businesses for success with compliance changes down the line. Ultimately, compliance should be invisible to the customer, but a structured governance plan helps enterprises turn compliance from a disadvantage untrustworthy governance into an advantage and transform growth opportunities across all global integrations with sustained trust from customers. As international compliance becomes more frequent and digital trust is still a sensitive topic, only a structured plan will allow enterprises to be compliant no matter where they operate.
