InvestEdge
Compliance Re-Imagined

In today’s financial compliance landscape, increased regulations have led to a significant rise in the expenses for banks and financial institutions. They not only have to abide by the standards created by external authorities but also comply with the set of rules established internally. In such a complex scenario, banks need effective compliance solutions that would help them minimize the expenditure and meet internal and external standards to identify potential exposures and appropriately address risks.

Having been in the industry for nearly 20 years, Pennsylvania-based technology solutions provider InvestEdge is uniquely positioned to address the evolving pain points associated with regulatory compliance of investment management firms and financial institutions through its proprietary compliance solution.

“Our technology specifically focuses on the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) guidance to banks on their asset management business. Daily monitoring, configurable alerts, tasks, and exception criteria provide banks with a management by exception approach to addressing their compliance needs. We have built controls, rules, and workflows that enable firms to address both the OCC guidelines and their internal investment process requirements. The results allow banks to streamline operations, identify risks, and build stronger client relationships,” begins Jeffrey Cowley, CTO at InvestEdge.

InvestEdge’s integrated solutions span all aspects of wealth management including portfolio management, trading and rebalancing, performance measurement, reporting, and data aggregation. Unlike its competitors, InvestEdge has developed a single integrated workflow to handle all processes.

InvestEdge’s newly enhanced Compliance solution, Compliance MiddleOffice Management (CMOM), focuses on the distribution of compliance activities across a firm’s entire operations. “In years passed it was expensive to handle the entire regulatory workload in the front office, but with the introduction of CMOM the work is distributed among teams across the middle and back office, which ultimately minimizes cost,” explains Cowley.

With CMOM, we have enabled compliance work to be distributed among teams in the front, middle, and back office which reduces cost and optimizes resources

One of the early adopters of CMOM outsources specific compliance activities outside of the firm, they required a system that allows them to assign those activities to the outsource firm and still have the proper oversight management and control. “Along with workload distribution, we borrowed another concept from the manufacturing industry; Quality Control. The Quality Control feature in CMOM enables firms to randomly select work and ensure that work adheres to the standards the regulators and firms have established. In the past firms would spend significant time and money, performing second level reviews of all compliance activity. This feature is being well received by both our larger and smaller banks,” says Cowley.

By the numbers, InvestEdge’s new Compliance MiddleOffice Management solution is allowing firms to achieve new levels of control. Their 2018 stats include:

• 100+ firms using the solution totalling over $1Trillion in AUM
• Approximately 350,000 annual reviews
• Nearly 9M flags and alerts triggered
• $0 in regulatory fines and legal expenses to date

InvestEdge is working toward expanding the CMOM concepts into other modules of its platform such as portfolio management and trading. The ROI for InvestEdge customers is reduction of cost across their entire investment management business.