KPMG 2021 Chief Compliance Officer Survey

Click here to see the full 2023 CCO Survey report.

In these years of prodigious change that have shifted the way in which global companies operate, Chief Ethics & Compliance Officers (CCOs) are taking the lead as change agents advancing their functions, operations and analytics from responsive to proactive. They are anticipating shifts in regulatory and stakeholder expectations and preventing exposures before they occur by adopting new approaches and technologies that help their companies stay at the forefront of change.

The KPMG 2021 CCO Survey: Sharing client perspectives on compliance imperatives explores how CCOs across multiple industries are adapting to these global trends and evolving risks.

Evolving risks

Enhance: Respondents were overwhelmingly clear that automation and technology would be integral to their compliance efforts (67 percent). This was the respondents’ overall top activity that they will focus on enhancing in the coming years; in contrast, CCOs responding to the KPMG 2019 CCO Survey selected “monitoring and testing” and “investigations” as their top activities to enhance. 

Top ethics and compliance activities to enhance

Refine: Across all industries, the largest percentage of respondents indicated that their top obligation to refine in the coming years was industry-specific regulations (39 percent), which is a significant increase from our 2019 CCO Survey. Other top obligations that CCOs are focused on refining include consumer protection (35 percent) and cyber/information protection (28 percent). Scroll down to request the full survey report.

Investments in compliance

Businesses have been aware for some time of the need to invest in automation and technology in order to enhance and monitor the effectiveness of internal processes and procedures, predict future outcomes, and enable better connectivity with third parties and customers.

Budget: Compliance departments appear to be receiving support in their technology journeys from the broader organization. Nearly half of respondents (49 percent) expect their overall ethics and compliance department budgets to increase year-over-year, while the vast majority of respondents (more than 75 percent) expect their technology budgets specifically to increase. 

Metrics: With the budget in place to increase the use of technology and automation in the compliance department, respondents overwhelmingly identified “data analytics” as both the greatest opportunity and the greatest priority for automation. Importantly, data analytics can be a critical input to decision makers and can greatly enhance the messaging and readability of internal and external reporting. In the report, you'll learn more about metrics commonly used to measure compliance effectiveness.

Ethics and compliance areas that present the greatest opportunity and priority for automation

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