Understanding RegTech: How to Manage the Increasing Complexity of Compliance

Wealth management is one of the more highly regulated industries, and with good reason. Regulation is necessary to protect investors, uphold professional integrity, ensure fair competition and support safe and efficient markets. But no one would deny that it is burdensome and becoming more so with each year for RIAs, broker-dealers, and dually registered firms.

Moreover, the industry is moving beyond paper-based processes and becoming increasingly digitized, generating growing amounts of data that need to be analyzed to identify issues. As firms add more investors, assets, and transaction volume, their compliance and surveillance demands also grow. As a result, regulatory technology or “RegTech” has become a must-have in any firm’s compliance program. As with so many other aspects of wealth management operations, technology can play a considerable role in streamlining compliance, improving efficiency, ensuring accurate and timely reporting, and reducing the risk of running afoul of regulators. Plus, with today’s advanced, cloud-based systems, firms have more options to leverage compliance technology than ever before. Combined with the latest data integrations, RegTech can complement existing solutions to get a technology-enabled compliance solution up and running quickly.

There is a strong case for advisory firms to invest sooner rather than later in technologies that will deliver immediate compliance efficiencies and scale with growth while helping to optimize existing compliance staff resources. This whitepaper identifies the core areas of supervision, surveillance, and monitoring required in today’s increasingly complex industry and details the latest approaches for deploying RegTech solutions.