Basel III, Solvency II, the Bribery Act. Regulation crowds in on business, straining its ability to comply with thickets of new rules.

And regulators and governments are not the only parties insisting on compliance. International standards bodies, customers and internal governance rules all make their demands.

Traditionally, companies have responded to the flow of regulation by memo, email and spreadsheet. But being alert to new rules from jurisdictions round the world and ensuring staff adhere to them is increasingly only possible through IT.

The answer that software providers have come up with is “business intelligence systems” that pull together all the information needed for a company to comply with the rules.

Equally important, they allow it to demonstrate to regulators are being obeyed.

Co-comply, a supplier of compliance and governance software to financial institutions and hedge funds, provides a platform that allows businesses to tag and retrieve the information that is vital to them.

One client used it to manage regulatory regimes covering three continents.

“People need to know what policies they have to be aware of, and where they can find them quickly if they need them,” says Chris Kaye, Co-comply founder and chief executive.

“In asset management firms, employees typically have to disclose any personal dealings. By putting this on one platform, the employee can disclose it to compliance and build an evidence chain.”

Activities recorded on a central platform can help managers see if there are unusual levels of employee trading in a particular area.

Staff training and qualifications can also be recorded on the platform to demonstrate people have the skills for the job they are doing.

Co-comply uses as the basis of its platform Microsoft SharePoint – a web application platform typically used for content and document management – but then develops products according to client requirements.

Signing documents – from sales contracts to non-disclosure agreements – is a basic but vital business activity that has largely depended on handwritten signatures in the past. But electronic signatures are now acceptable in the main legal jurisdictions and their use can boost efficiency, says Bob DeSantis, managing director Europe for DocuSign.

He says: “In the old world, contract documents would come in. They would be reviewed, checked that they had been signed in all the right places, that customers had not struck out any clauses, filed and stored. Electronic signatures ensure you sign in all the right places and do not allow clauses to be struck out. Purchase order and credit card numbers can be transferred to whatever system they need to be in.”

One client, a wealth management firm, reported a drop in incorrectly filled-in forms from 30 per cent to zero, he notes.

Regulatory compliance is only one aspect of a broader management challenge, according to Giampiero Saracino, head of the governance, risk and compliance practice at EMC, a data storage specialist.

“The main issue is the poor visibility of the [business’s] real risk profile,” he says. “Less than 30 per cent of corporate data has the minimal level of security required. Companies are under pressure to demonstrate control over regulatory complexity. We suggest a programme that avoids ‘silos’ and integrates all programmes in one place.”

One large finance company’s primary reporting tools were spreadsheets, which contributed to a dispersal of vital information over unconnected silos throughout the business.

“We provided it with a single enterprise platform so it was able to aggregate risk and compliance data.”

The platform included a remediation process – to measure whether the company’s risk and compliance management process was improving.

“The management of such a programme is a journey, not a ‘big bang’,” says Mr Saracino. “It needs to be flexible and resilient to business change.

“A company’s objectives can evolve and the programme needs to stay aligned with those objectives and with the company’s appetite for risk.”

Installing compliance systems – and keeping them up to date – can be expensive and distract companies from making a more innovative and profitable use of their IT resources, according to a recent report by Xantus, a business consultancy.

“Regulations are being revised and updated continually, leaving little respite between projects,” it says.

More than half of chief information officers (CIOs) in the financial services sector spend upwards of a third of their total IT change budget on regulation-specific IT, the report states.

And 96 per cent have seen regulatory compliance spending rise noticeably over the past three years.

On the plus side, CIOs are increasingly using regulatory compliance work to enhance the business case for innovation.