The Strong Arm of Compliance: Reg Change Management

Regulatory change hasn’t slowed down, and in this session of Compliance & Coffee, Bella Guerrero, SVP and Chief Compliance Officer at Guild Mortgage, walked us through how her team stays ahead of it. She broke change management down to three steps: identifying a change through direct regulator alerts, trusted law firm bulletins, and vendors like ActiveComply, assessing whether and how it applies to the business, and implementing it in a way that fits the company’s resources and risk tolerance. A recurring theme was ownership. Guild tracks every change in one centralized log, but it’s the business unit closest to the impact that implements and ultimately validates the fix, which keeps compliance from being seen as the only department responsible for staying compliant.

The conversation also covered where compliance fits into business decisions like launching a new product, entering a new state, or adopting AI. Bella’s advice was to bring compliance in at the planning stage, not the night before launch, and to treat earning a seat at the table as something built through trust rather than assumed. That means training business teams on where state and federal law can conflict, and shifting the compliance relationship from “the department that says no” to a partner working toward a safe yes.