Name: Maximizing Your Compliance Investment in 2025
Uploaded: 2025-03-26T14:53:03.763Z
Duration: 37 min 4 s
Description: Maximizing Your Compliance Investment in 2025

Transcript for "Maximizing Your Compliance Investment in 2025": Compliance can be complex and confusing, but it's crucial, especially for financial services firms. But managing compliance sometimes feels more like just checking boxes than building a scalable compliance program. With regulatory pressures mounting, fines increasing, and new requirements emerging every day, five tasks become 500 just like that. And the spreadsheets, point solutions, and consultants you've had to cobble together to manage it all just can't keep up. Before you know it, it's like you have as many solutions as you do regulations to adhere to, which means your tech stack is growing, complexity is increasing, and you're still not sure you're protecting your firm and your investors against that 10 figure fine. You don't need to check more boxes. You don't need a patchwork of point solutions, and you don't need siloed reporting. You need a partner who's been where you've been, who knows what you're dealing with, and who can provide a comprehensive solution for the challenges you face today and in the future. You need COMPLY. COMPLY is a comprehensive solution built by compliance experts who understand the nuances of global regulations and who continually raise the bar on what financial services firms can and should expect from their compliance partner. Configurable by design, COMPLY brings together technology and regulatory experts to give you a 360 degree view of your compliance world. Together, our software and world. Together, our software and consulting services allow you to address both firm and employee compliance challenges in a unified experience. From navigating regulatory changes and remediating deficiencies, filing disclosures, assessing risk, conducting your annual review, updating your firm's policies and procedures, to disseminating certifications, monitoring employee trades and political contributions, reviewing off channel communication, managing violations, mitigating conflicts of interest, and more. Comply frees you up to focus on more strategic priorities. Learn how financial services firms like broker dealers, RIAs, wealth managers, private funds, insurance companies, and retail and investment banks are using Comply to build comprehensive, resilient compliance programs. Compliance is critical and Comply has you covered. Learn how you can comply with confidence@comply.com. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Comply Solution Showcase, maximizing your compliance investment in 2025. I hope you enjoyed the video that you saw at the beginning of the session. Today, I am joined by David Bliss, our chief product officer, and Oron Arbogast, who is our solutions engineer. David's gonna walk you all through a look back of the 2024 innovations, what's coming in 2025, and then Oron gonna walk us through a couple of use cases of best in class, ways to use the Comply platform. And with that, I'm gonna oh, before I before I wrap up, just some housekeeping items. A recording of this session will be available to everyone afterwards, so look out for an email from Comply. And then if you have any questions, I'll provide my contact information afterwards, and you're welcome to reach out. And with that, I'm gonna pass it over to David. Excellent. Thank you, Alison. Let's jump right into the agenda. We have a lot of great, information to cover today. So as you can see here, we're gonna do a quick review of some of the major releases from 2025 2024. Excuse me. Looking at the road map for '25. We're gonna talk a little bit about the longer term vision and what comes next. And then, like Alison just said, Oron gonna show you some of these great things in the one Comply platform, and then we will have some q and a. So let's dive right in. If you have joined me and Oron for any of our recent, Comply program management or other webinars, you have seen this next slide before, which gives an overview of all of the capabilities that we can, provide to our clients at Comply. So I won't drain all of these bullet points, but, please notice that you'll see a couple of categories of capabilities down at the bottom from new registration for BDs and investment advisers, firm compliance, program management to employee compliance, and even third party compliance. So all of these capabilities are being delivered through a single platform, and you'll see a lot of, that theme throughout the conversation today. So another way to look at what we do is what we call the infinity loop here, where you've got a number of strategic CCO and office of the CCO tasks on the right lobe of the loop here. So risk assessments, annual reviews, all of your regulatory filings, setting and managing your policies and procedures, WSPs if you're a broker dealer. Right? And then in the middle, you've got your calendar. How does the CCO and her team manage all of this stuff throughout the year? Then you have the left lobe, which is the day to day work that the compliance team has to facilitate, has to review certifications, pre clearance requests, trades, communications from all of the supervised employees, investment advisers, broker dealer reps, all of the political contributions, licensing, and registration, the the stuff that sort of never ends. Right? And the great part about the OneComply platform is you can now do both sets of these things, the strategic program management and the day to day tasks, especially around managing employees and the supervision requirements in one place. So let's look at twenty twenty four year end review. Obviously, we don't have time to go into a ton of detail on all of the the great things that we launched in 2024, but I'm really proud of what, the team was able to accomplish in a twelve month period on the one Comply platform. So just a couple of key items, the Comply program management product, which was technically launched in December of twenty three, so just before the start of last year, was significantly expanded in '24. We also added a number of new dashboard widgets to the One Comply homepage. So for all of the compliance staff that log in, the first thing you see is your your dashboard for all of your day to day activities, top trades, overdue certifications, or preclearance request, trade violations, all of that stuff, and it's configurable. We also launched the comply fiduciary suite building on the momentum of our rollover analyzer tool to meet the department of labor requirement for four zero one k rollovers. We expanded our SMCR solution. So for all of our UK clients and international clients that have operations either in The UK, Ireland, Singapore, Australia, a few other geographies that have individual accountability regime requirements. That SMCR solution is great for those, those activities. And then finally, last but certainly not least, we launched case management in the OneComply platform. So if you were a COMPLY customer historically, this is now available to you. It's part of everyone's, platform, and Oron will actually talk a little bit about case management later as will I in a later slide. Alright. So let's dive into best in class broker feed automation. So, you'll see we started working on some of this modernization last year. We're finishing it up right now, but we have, 350 ish brokers, which is best in class. But more importantly, that coverage allows us to get clients well over 90% account coverage for their employee personal brokerage accounts. Right? So the benefit is getting that automated feed coming in, validating and matching against pre clearance requests, monitoring against restricted lists and all of your trade rules. And so, we are putting a ton of time and energy and and dollars for r and d into always utilizing the best practice technologies to get more brokers on more quickly and improve the monitoring of all of our existing broker accounts and broker fees going forward. Alright. So case management. I mentioned this earlier. Essentially, you can think of this as a violations log. Now there are other use cases, but the violations log is the most common where you can, automatically populate a case based on a trade violation communication, for example, in the product. But you can also create all sorts of other cases with configurable forms and workflows in the product. So for example, if you have a marketing rule violation or concern and you're performing research on some piece of marketing, if you are, again, dot just documenting a trade violation, if you're just doing research on some other project unrelated to a violation, you can create those custom case forms, populate the information, manage all of your attachments and status updates and notes, and it's there for audit trail purposes. You can create a report at any time. Alright. Cruising right along. So, I think we're gonna jump into 2025 road map. If you follow us on, LinkedIn or other socials, if you are watching our press releases, you saw that COMPLY put out, I think, in late January. Right, Alison? January, early February, a press release that essentially articulated our 2025 road map. So, we wanted to be really transparent and clear about what we're working on. We think that it is, really exciting set of capabilities to improve our existing products, to integrate further our capabilities, and, to drive net new innovation. So I won't drain all of the things on the right side of this, of this slide, but you'll have it as a takeaway. You can certainly refer to that recent press release. But I'll talk about one or two. So we are fully integrating our, firm compliance capabilities under the Comply program management umbrella. We already have the compliance calendar. We will be adding a broker dealer specific set of content. We already have great SCC and for The UK folks, FCA content, to build upon in the calendar. We also have in CPM on the next slide here, you'll see the annual review capability, which is there. So, documenting your required annual reviews, it's tied to the calendar. So, of course, the calendar keeps you on track to completing your annual review in in pieces throughout the year so you're not, caught off guard at the end with a a huge chunk of work to do. And also, of course, integrated to the calendar and annual review is the risk assessment tool tool. So going through something like 40 ish categories of risk that are common for financial services providers, documenting where your specific firm and operations exposes you to certain risks at a higher level or lower level, again, depending on your unique business, documenting that and tying it to your annual review to say, did we perform at the level expected based on our higher levels of scrutiny in this risk area or lower levels of of risk and therefore less need to do, extensive follow-up in this lower risk area. And so you're you're always taking a risk based approach to your program. And what we are now adding to these three great capabilities in our Comply program management tool in April. Right? So very, very soon is this intelligent policy builder, feature. So we we've managed policies and policy templates for many years for our clients. We're pulling that capability into this one platform, enhancing it. And so, again, if you've got your own existing policies and procedures, great. You load them into the tool and you can keep them updated here, and, of course, store all of your historical versions. And your live versions are connected to your calendar, your annual review, your risk assessment. One of the coolest things about this tool is that we constantly are pushing new content through the templates. So whenever we see a change in focus from the SEC or FINRA or whomever, whenever there is a new rule going live, obviously, the big one right now for US Investment Advisers is the AML rule going into effect in January of twenty twenty six. We are pushing suggested updates to your policies and procedures to your man manuals in this tool. And, of course, you can take that template, tweak it, and then add it to your official document. If it's irrelevant to you, obviously, you can ignore it, but we are always recommending new stuff to you and giving you great content that in many cases is ready to go with a copy and paste and obviously can be edited when you need to make it more specific to your firm. Alright. So, switching gears a little bit. One of the other great things that we're working on in q two and q three is this concept of employee three sixty, including a bulletin board capability for better communications, across and amongst employees and the compliance department within, the COMPLY platform. So tagging of individuals, more configurable profiles for each of the employees. So, obviously, we have the capability to say, well, this this person is here in the org chart and is part of this department. Right? So groups in our in our platform, and departments and hierarchies. Now you can also tag individuals across groups. So you can say, here are all of the new hires across all of our areas. Whether they're in the whether they're on the trading floor or whether they are an individual investment adviser or whether they're the CEO. Right? This is a new hire or this is a a VIP. This is a high volume trader or this is a low volume trader. It gives you immediate context in a number of different ways. And so any one person could, at one time, have two or three different tags. Right? Like, oh, this is a VIP, and it's a new hire. Okay. So now I can treat that person with a little more grace around, like, getting up to speed with our policies and procedures, learning our systems, and and treat them accordingly. Right? So, again, a huge request from a number of our clients. We listened, and, we're really excited about this launch in the near future. And then I mentioned the bulletin board really briefly, facilitating much better, transparent, real time communication. So anyone who logs into the system will have a bespoke set of communications presented to them and, the the compliance department will have a great tool to more effectively communicate, immediate needs from the employees, upcoming things to be aware of. And you can see, again, escalations, flagging of important actions. But, again, this was one of those requests from clients is help me communicate with my end users in a better way. Alright. So finally is this three sixty insights. This is where, of course, anyone who is a user of our platform, especially for employee compliance. Right? So trade monitoring, pre clearance, GNEs, OBAs, etcetera. You want to be able to see the full context before making a decision on approving or denying something from an individual employee broker, what whoever it might be. And so this tool will now give you much more summarized aggregated data in one view in a very quick easy to digest format. And so now you may not have to click as many times or go to as many different places to get that context to make that quick approval or denial or I need more information decision. And then, of course, if you need to dig in further, all of the detailed reports history is is is available and linked in this one place. So that's what we mean by three sixty insights. Alright. And I think the final slide, apologies for the death by PowerPoint here. I'll turn it over to Oron in just a second, is our AI innovation. So we are, like everyone, of course, thinking about what AI means for the compliance industry at large and especially how we can use it in a valuable but, of course, safe and sustainable way for our clientele. And so we've got three great use cases on the road map for this year, working proofs of concept in all of these areas actually. So a support agent helping our users figure out how to do things in our system much more quickly, immediately, but still giving them really rich instructions, screenshots, step by step guidelines on how to get things done. We've seen, our AI tool be 90% accurate on this with our internal support team, and we're gonna be rolling it out to end users. Natural language querying is simply getting a report much faster by asking for that report or a specific data point in natural language and getting the response directly versus building a report yourself, exporting it, looking at it in Excel. You can still do that, of course, but this will get you the answer much more quickly. And finally, the AI policy analyzer. Really excited about this. So you've you've already got your policies managed in the tool in many cases. Hopefully, with the the new policy builder for the CPM tool, we'll have many more of you using it. So we can automatically suggest new calendar items, recurring tasks. So, hey. You say in your procedures, you're gonna do this audit once a month. Here's a calendar item that pops up every month. We've assigned it to so and so based on what we see in your documentation, and now you're up and running with a reminder every month to take care of that, that task. And, also, we can answer end user questions about those policies and procedures with this tool. A number of our enterprise clients have said, help me stem the flood of are are we allowed to do this? What is our policy on that? What is our gifts and entertainment limits for this? And so instead of just answering these repetitive rote questions, the AI tool can do it. And we've seen great, promise with simply having an AI application, look at the document, answer the user's question, and refer them to the chapter and verse where they can go and read it in in its entirety. Right? So this is a huge opportunity for us to help our our clients be much more productive by getting rid of the busy work. Okay. I've done a lot of talking. I will now stop and turn it over to Oron. Thank you so much. Alright, Oron. Oron gonna go ahead and present a demo. The first one we're gonna start with is what do you think what do you do when you think an employee is violating rules outlined in your policies and procedures? I'll pass it over to you, Oron. Thank you so much, Alison. And, David, also, thank you so much for that really informative and exciting demonstration. I'm also, for the audience, I'll say I'm also gonna touch a little bit on, what we're doing with artificial intelligence around policies and procedures later in the demo. I will go ahead and start sharing my screen. And what I'm sharing with you, to to start off is actually a a notification to a supervisor regarding a a trade rule violation. And so in this case, the violation that we're looking at is for a a trade of a thousand shares of NVIDIA. And so now I've been notified of this as a supervisor. I can go into my Comply site instance and start doing some investigation around what happened with this particular violation. So now I've logged into my comply site instance and, on the supervisor dashboard here, we've got a communication center, which is where things like, trade rule violations would populate. And so I can click into the particular violation here, and we can see it's this, this buy of a thousand shares within NVIDIA. If I click view, the system is gonna provide me a little bit deeper detail. Again, it's outlining the transaction is. And right at the top of the page, it's noting that this is, related to a firm trade. So one of the really key uses of COMPLY is to ingest either your firm or client trade data and then use that, in comparison with your employee preclearance, request as well as their post trade, their, sorry, the post trade process on their broker transactions. And so in this case, this particular transaction did violate, violate, that particular rule. We could see the details of the account that it took place in. And if I scroll, within the screen right here, we could see, you know, it violates with this firm trade. I can click this hyperlink and this and the system will show me here's that particular firm trade in question if I wanna take a look at it. And I could see, you know, again, the salient details and make a decision whether or not this merits, an actual violation with the employees. So let's presume that, it does merit a violation. I can, within this particular communication, piece, categorize it and classify it. In this case, looks like previously, I'd assigned it as a false positive, but in this case, we'll we'll mark it as as a violation. And by virtue of doing that on a historical basis, when you need to run reports, you can now use this classification field and report on specific violation reasons. You can also communicate with the end user. You know, perhaps, you want to, portray, some particular message here. You know, you could just enter the text that you would like. Send. You could also optionally make a make a supervisor note that's optionally visible to, the employee. And when you're ready, click send, and that would, kick off the communication. Oron would receive a notice in his email that he's got something to review, and within that email would include a deep hyperlink. He could click a secure link that would then open and display the the message there. Now separate from that particular communication thread in this this violation notification, now according to my policy, I want to actually start tracking this as a potential disciplinary item. So one of the features that David mentioned or a recent enhancement is the addition of this, case management functionality here within, Comply site. And so, I could click into, the case management here. And as you mentioned, it's like a violations log. And in this case, I I want to go ahead and start creating that that violations log here. So I could create a new case, select the employee that it's, in regards to. If for whatever reason, it's a it's a violation that's not in particularly related to a specific employee, that liability for that as well. The the those types of cases, I should say. And then for here, with a particular case type, we're gonna give you some default ones that you can select from. In this case, I'm gonna select trade, and I've got a a sub case subtype here, front running. So, you know, obviously, if Oron trying to trade with the firm, that would constitute front running. So we've given you that as one of the case types that you could leverage. In this case, we'll put it in the status of investigation. I can give it a severity here. And, again, these are values that that will populate for you, default values. These fields are also customizable. And so maybe until I know a little bit more, I'm just gonna consider this a low severity. Within the, the, case, you've got the incident date that you can report on, discovery date, write a description of the item. And then when you're ready and you've reached a resolution, you can indicate that as well. So So resolution date and then the details of the resolution. If there are any supporting documents that are required, you could, attach those to the case as well. You would click create new case, and the system would then, create that particular record. And you could see a history of, the cases that have been created here. You know, I've got customer complaints and some other ways that I'm using, this particular functionality. Perhaps that would end your, your process there. I will say what I have seen some clients do is also take this a step further, and then perhaps maybe this is not something that's low severity and maybe it's high severity and it's a it's a and it's a grave concern. In this case, what I have seen clients do is perhaps this is a a more severe. They will create a heightened supervision group within their site. And then what they can do is apply a specific preclearance rule to that supervision group. So for example, in this particular case, I'm now considering this a little bit more severe. I can place Oron in this heightened supervision group. And then within COMPLY, I can configure what action I want the system to take for that particular group. So in this case, I've got a a rule staged here. It's a trade rule, height and supervision. I could select here the group that it applies to and then the action that I want the rule to take. And so maybe in this case, I'm gonna be nice and just say, send everything to pending. I've also seen clients make the default be denied. So for a certain period of time, that employee cannot take, cannot have actions approved in the system. So I will say that's a really a a very, virtuous circle of how I have seen, clients handle these particular, trade rule violations, for example, regarding firm trades. As I alluded to earlier, I'd like to show you a little bit about what we're doing in relation to the document builder and then specifically, content related to artificial intelligence. So within our compliance, program management tools, one of them includes a risk assessment. And within the risk assessment, we have identified common areas of risk that we know, firms need to track. We update this annually. So one of the recent updates that we made is adding generative artificial intelligence as one as a risk that our firm should be tracking. What I have done is I I clicked into one of these headers. I I like to think of them as as rubrics. You can click into them. They're gonna expand, and the system will outline, individual sub risks that you should be tracking. And then within these risk items, you are indicating low, medium, high, or not applicable. In this case, for my firm, I've said this is a a high risk. I've so far, I've addressed it using my policies and procedures manual. The responsible party is is Riley. And I've just mentioned that it's the the section that it relates to is generative AI. I've got a note here, talking about this particular risk again, and I've got up to 2,000 characters I could leverage. So some firms will use this as a snapshot in time. Other firms will come in throughout the year and and make updates as policies or risks evolve. So I've now documented this generative AI as part of my risk assessment. You'll notice also over here on the left, one of the tools includes, an annual review. Taking a look at the 2025 version, what I will say is the way the tools function is we break it into these bite sized pieces. You're writing summaries and filling out different fields within these, sections. And then ultimately, the system will output a consolidated document reflecting all of all of the details that you've input here. So I've come in and talked about the update I've made to my, policies and procedures manual here. So I talked about, you know, recent updates were made. I've clarified the definition, and I've added section five dot two regarding ethical, use of artificial intelligence. So right now within the system, I'm capturing, hey. I've I've got I've got the risk that I'm monitoring. I'm also now documenting that I've I've taken that particular action. Now as David alluded to, soon, another option within this program management section will be a document builder. And when you click into that, this screen will open. And as you can see at the top, we've got different sections for IE manual, code of ethics, other types of control documents that you might be using. And I've got the generative, AI section here at the top. It's in progress. I've been making some some edits to it. And so I'd like to show you what that content looks like. I will say we are very proud of, the content that we deliver. It's developed based on all of the over forty years of expertise from our, consultants who are examiners, former CCOs, former regulators. And now I'm showing here in the page that's loaded, this is the actual document builder. So we could see here's the content related to AI. It's got a background talking about what my policies and procedures are, acceptable acceptable vendors, etcetera. Over here on the left, I've got some other options I can take, you know, adding merge fields, etcetera. So if I've got my firm name or or other variables that I'm using within the the policies and procedures, those would automatically populate. And then once I'm ready, I've got that policy updated. As you could see, I've got many other sections that I've already created here. I can now publish the sections that I have updated here. So in this case, perhaps I'm still working on these two, but I'd like to update this and publish this one on generative AI. I can either preview it, see what it's going to look like. But in this case, I'm gonna go ahead and and update it. We'll just give it an example name here. And so the system is also gonna prompt me when I publish it to automatically create a certification. And so that's often, the final step that is easily forgotten. You've done the updates. We're gonna automatically prompt you and remind you, hey. Would you like to create a certification? And then what has happened now is behind the scenes, the system is letting me know it's, going to create a certification within ComplySci that I can now launch and have my employees test attest to these particular updates. I really appreciate everyone's attention today. I believe, Alison, we're gonna allow some time for, FAQs. So I'll go ahead and turn it back to you. Yes. Thank you, David, and thank you, Oron, for both joining me today. We are a little short on time. So and I'm seeing a different questions coming through the chat. So I'm gonna you can email me at the email address that will be in the chat, or I will be reaching out to you individually with those questions so that we can answer them for you. And yet again or yet again. Again, there will be a recording of this available to you in the next coming days. Thank you for joining.