Constructing digital compliance: a connected mindset approach

Digital compliance involves the conversion of natural language regulatory rules into computer code to support regulated entities’ compliance processes. Literal and decontextualised digitisation approaches lead to incomplete and ineffective compliance solutions, increasing legal and reputational risks. There is a need for more sophisticated approaches to digital compliance that grapple with the complexity of open-textured regulatory provisions, diverse types of regulatory guidance, entity-specific compliance requirements and computational challenges. To address this gap, this article develops and applies a new connected mindset approach for constructing digital compliance that combines and extends insights from literature on regulatory mindsets and compliance construction, and computer science literature on behaviour-driven development. Overall, our analysis underscores the value of constructing digital compliance in a way that incorporates legal, regulatory, computational and entity-specific compliance requirements to design more connected and contextualised digital compliance infrastructures.