For smaller lenders, the biggest challenge is convincing employees that “this is a real risk to them” if they don’t complete the compliance training, said Mark Dapier, general counsel and chief compliance officer at Turner Acceptance Corp. “Then try to help them figure out how to do it within their means — that’s the real issue.”
If a company doesn’t have the capital to invest internally to make sure it’s compliant, “you won’t make it,” Exeter Finance Corp. Chief Executive Jason Grubb told AFN. “It may not have been a big deal five-to-10 years ago, but today it is.”
“For someone to make the right decision, they have to know the business, and today part of it is not just profit but compliance,” Grubb said. In order to understand the business of auto finance — compliance training can’t be web-based, because it’s too much information. “So we will definitely spend more time in the classroom for training. We want to educate our staff on what that entails.” If you don’t have staff that is educated, you won’t be able to take advantage of certain opportunities, he added.
Employees are “inundated with training from every direction,” Linda Iannone, Toyota Financial Services’ chief compliance officer, said. “Keeping retention and getting them engaged will set training apart from the rest. With such an important subject, you don’t want them to view the training as another chore.” As such, TFS implements games into its compliance training to make it more enjoyable, she said.
Each year, TFS hosts a Compliance Week to raise awareness about compliance throughout the organization. For the first Compliance Week in 2014, the captive’s program included “Who Wants to Be a Compliance Millionaire?” and last year’s event incorporated professional comedians who role-played situations in “Whose Compliance Is It, Anyway?”
Dealing with compliance in a lighthearted way can help employees better engage and enjoy the training, Iannone added. TFS is also looking into “gamification and adaptive learning to make training more targeted to each employee’s level of knowledge or ability,” she said.
There are ways to make compliance training more fun and interactive, VW Credit’s Barrie said, but of all the training that the captive requires, compliance training is the least popular. VW Credit is actively looking to make its compliance training more fun, but in the meantime, the company incorporates Jeopardy-style games and other activities in its weekly and monthly team meetings “just to reinforce concepts that we are learning.”
Overall, gamification is “a very effective training method,” Iannone said, and TFS plans to implement the strategy into its training by yearend. Web-based training “is really a necessary channel in today’s rapidly changing regulatory environment, and also — given realities of today’s dispersed workforce — it’s efficient and cost-effective,” Iannone said. “So the key is to make it engaging.”
For example, TFS may implement game features, like scoring capabilities, into an online training module, “so employees can watch their score go up and can compete with other employees,” she added.
The bottom line is that “you can’t do live training for the entire organization for every single regulation you need to train on, so the more fun you can make the online version, the mores success you are going to have,” Iannone said.
This story originally appeared in the June issue of Auto Finance News. For access to this publication, subscribe here.