GRACE to Manage Compliance and Conduct Risk

Establish the culture of compliance and provide proper oversight

Establish and Monitor the Culture of Compliance in your organization

Regulatory examinations have become very intense to scrutinize proof of compliance to regulatory expectations as well as proper conduct risk of employees, registered representatives and financial advisors is being monitored. Stringent verification is being done to ensure processes as in place for proper oversight on protection of client interests, as financial firms conduct their business. Chief Compliance Officers (CCOs) are also being personally held responsible and liable where they see failures.

GRACE for Compliance and Conduct Risk Monitoring is an easy to use system to set up and keep updated the Code of Ethics, Policies and Procedures and get everyone to attest them on a periodic basis as well as train them on their compliance obligations to establish the culture

The GRACE Online Compliance Portal can help Employees, Registered Representatives and Advisors to request and obtain pre-trade approvals, report gifts, political donations, entertainment bills, outside business activities and their filings. Monitoring conflicts of interest, compliance violations and identifying issues becomes easy and trends early. Automated rejection for code of conduct request based on business rules can make the compliance burden more manageable.

Compliance Calendars, with scheduled tasks and alerts can help everyone to do their compliance tasks on time and report into the system.

Compliance dashboards can provide view on all compliance activities with analytics and automatically generate reports to help the Compliance Oversight function be effective.

Recent News

Non-Compliance Not a Choice

Regulatory examinations on financial organizations have become stringent and intense. Surprise exams, sweep exams and risk alerts, regulators knocking on doors without advance notice and coming equipped with information on the firms activities is the new norm.

Without a continuous oversight and compliance monitoring process and books and records to substantiate it, the firm is not going to be able to defend itself against violations, leading to regulatory fines, reputation loss and legal costs.

Compliance officers can no longer work manually or with Excel sheets alone and need proper tools to identify issues as they arise. Regulators are red-flagging organizations that do not provide their compliance staff with tools as weak on compliance. Compliance officers can be personally held liable for not doing proper oversight over violations

Offering an online web based solution like GRACE to everyone can be a great enabler

Easy and efficient communication between compliance teams and staff, registered representatives and advisors working from remote locations is proving more essential in today’s environment than ever before.

Offering employees, registered representatives and advisors, a web tablet mobile system like GRACE with online forms to request pre-approvals, report compliance testing, report their gifts, political contributions, outside activities and filings be the best way for compliance officers to get their data on a central system rather than in e-mails. Ensuring policies and procedures and Code of Ethics are periodically attested, training is offered and approval requests are automatically rejected based on code of ethics business rules can help the Compliance officer manage their loads and bring to light violations early.

A visible, single source of truth, with easy to use workflows, forms, alerts integrated with automated data load, red-flagging and issue management across the organization can be a great way to implement compliance across the board, and have central books and records to meet the regulators needs.

Visible compliance also becomes a very useful marketing tool for you to provide assurance to your existing clients and grow your clientele as an Organization they can trust.

GRACE can help your Compliance Team feel confident of their oversight

GRACE Compliance Management System provides you with a collaborative tool to set up the various compliance management activities, policies and procedures, code of ethics, attestations, trainings and monitor their progress

Oversight over various approval requests, Outside Business Activities, Personal trades, Registrations, U4, ADV, gifts and political donations, expenses, conflicts of interest, trades and private placements helps easily identify violations and prevent their escalation.

Ready to go books and records for the compliance process in the organization helps breeze through examinations with confidence at all times

GRACE Compliance Management

Web based Anytime Anywhere Compliance Management

Manage your Policies and Procedures

  • GRACE can help you build your Central repository of Written Policies and Procedures through functions where you can add, update, review and release policies, procedures, manages versions, review comments and histories.
  • Provides you the Policies Dashboard that can be used as a ready reference of latest documents both for staff. Have a ready to go query and retrieve of the WSPs on demand for your regulatory examinations.
  • Fully reviewed and released policies and WSPs can be sent online for Attestation to staff to ensure they understand the procedures and can use it as they do their functions

Manage your Compliance Monitoring Process

  • Set up the compliance monitoring process by defining and record compliance groups and activities for the various business activities. Set up the Calendar for each of the activities, periodicity of verification and assign them to the relevant staff.
  • Each member of your staff will be able to use their My Portal to show them the Calendar of activities and ensure they are alerted on due dates. Staff can record the verification done as well as load the supporting documents and issues seen online for their activities.
  • Issues are sent for reviews and can be escalated and resolved through the system

Manage Regulatory Expectations and obligations of your business

  • When regulations change, track and keep, conduct impact analysis , identify, assign and manage tasks for change management.
  • Map regulations to current policies and procedures to ensure that the organizational policies and procedures comprehensively cover the regulatory requirements.

Conduct Regulatory Reviews

  • GRACE can allow you to setup and manage regulatory calendars, checklists and assignments for organizational reviews from various departments thru on-line survey like questionnaires, record the findings and identify process issues and risks. Assign issue / risk mitigation responsibility to staff members and monitor progress of tasks for issue and risk management through online reporting.

Staff can get pre-trade Approvals and report personal trades

  • Pre-trade requests can be sent online using pre-defined forms. These requests would be automatically queued up for compliance to review / approve / reject based on appropriateness. Pre-defined rules and limits can also be set up to automatically approve / reject or send for compliance review. When approvals or rejection are completed by Compliance, email alert will be sent back to the requestor.
  • Restricted trade lists can be set up and any trades verified for violations.
  • Brokerage accounts which staff have in numerous brokerages can be set up for compliance officers to receive their personal trades allow compliance officers to monitor Insider trading patterns

Staff can report their Gifts, Political Donations, Outside Activities and U4/U5

Automated Workflows, Email alerts and My Portal queues ensure that the tasks are brought to attention so the responsible person is aware of it.

Online Attestation

  • GRACE provides the ability to set up templates with the legal language by for all the required attestations that staff need to attest.
  • Attestation requests can be periodically sent to groups of staff and both attestation and related data can be gathered online.
  • Online Attestation for documents like Code of Ethics and WSPs can be sent to staff for them to read and attest periodically
  • Attestation Dashboards can quickly provide status on attestations and ensure reminders are sent to ensure compliance.

Training Management

  • GRACE provides the ability to set up training calendars and assign them to respective staff and monitor training completion.
  • Customized training material can be created by La Meer as well as per clients requirements and offered to staff
  • Training Dashboards can quickly provide status on training and ensure reminders are sent to ensure compliance.

Marketing Material and Disclosures Management

  • GRACE can help set up Disclosure and Marketing Material and manage their versioning, review and release process
  • Client Management users can have access to the latest marketing material and disclosures when they need to share them with their clients.

Manage Filings

  • GRACE can help set up Filings information and manage their versioning, review and release process
  • This will allow organizations have all their filings information in a single source of truth.

Manage Users

  • GRACE has a central user management system for providing accesses to various functions within the organization based on their roles and responsibilities.

My Portal for all Staff

  • My Portal shows the list of all the actionable items that are due from you, that includes requests for action, requests for reviews, tasks etc. It shows you the calendar of all your activities and leads you to action functions where each activity can be undertaken.
  • Allows findings and other actions to be recorded on the calendar date for compliance monitoring Provides form for reporting Risk Status, task status, project status
  • Allows you to report your approval requests, as well as reporting forms to compliance. Allows you to have a copy of all the information that you have submitted for compliance for you to refer to them whenever you need
  • Allows you to take a look at Code of Ethics and Policy/Procedure docs when you need to refer to them
  • Allows you to do your attestations on-line as well as record your training

Dashboards

  • GRACE CCO offers multiple actionable dashboards that are specialized for each area including Policy and Procedure Dashboard, Regulations Dashboard, Compliance Dashboard, Risk Assessment dashboard, Attestation Dashboard, Training Dashboard, Trade Dashboard etc. Access Rights can be turned on or off to each of the dashboards
  • Each dashboard will present the overall information, charts, trends, reports and queries and will allow Slice and dice & deep drill down on all information gathered and status of approval
  • Issues, risk and mitigation management and trends with graphics and reports will enable action to be taken
  • Reports can be queried for user defined criteria, printed and exported to Excel / PDF formats where permitted

The Great Value that GRACE Brings to You

Continuous and Effective Compliance Monitoring Anytime Anywhere

Visibility and Transparency to Risks

Staff and Senior Management can have a visible real time view of violation as they happen to take early corrective action

Institutionalizing of Compliance

Compliance management becomes an institutionalized process. Ownership and Responsibility is visible and accountable. This ensures activities are undertaken on time without any backlog .

Compliance officers have Powerful tool

Compliance Officers have a tool for monitoring through approval / rejection and ensure compliance within the organization

Business as usual Process for Compliance Monitoring

Compliance Monitoring and Reporting on the action taken on the compliance process becomes a business as usual process, ensuring that issues are identified early as they happen

Regulatory examinations can be handled with confidence

Information gathering and report creation for regulatory audits is a very costly operation for all organizations. The GRACE system becomes the proof of good compliance management in the organization and saves enormous amount of money in this data gathering and report creation process.

Review and Response Process Automated

Automated Workflows, Email alerts and My Portal queues ensure that the tasks are brought to attention so the responsible person is aware of it.

Organization Ownership of Data

Organizations suffer when key risk and compliance staff leaves. The information is scattered if maintained solely by individuals and are lying on disks in various forms. GRACE becomes the single central repository of documents, data and processes enabling continuity even when key people leave the organization

Standardized forms for all compliance requests

Online Forms set up for compliance enables staff to interact with the Compliance team for requests, reporting and approvals, making it an easy for data gathering. Auto approvals business rules can be set up to reduce workload on Compliance stop

Online Attestation ensures all are aware of the latest rules

Online Attestation ensures that the staff is made aware of the latest regulatory expectations and they sign and attest to adhere to the rules

Easy to Integrate and Customize

GRACE offers easy integration with organizational source systems to enhance the functionality and extend it at low costs. This is a great benefit for end users who can bring in all the relevant data into a single system through automated process allowing them to focus on risk management and compliance instead of data gathering

Single Source of Truth for the Organization

Will all documents, data, reviews, audit trails, analytics and easy to use queries and reports, GRACE becomes the central repository of the Single Source of Truth for the organization for all books and records to be presented for regulatory examination

Enormous Cost Savings

Enormous costs savings in unwanted labor for audits and examinations, avoid regulatory fines, legal costs, reputation risks and empowers the organization in managing risks.

Latest News

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Annual Eversheds Sutherland Analysis of FINRA Disciplinary Actions Shows Huge Surge in Financial Sanctions

All information Quoted from the article https://us.eversheds-sutherland.com/NewsCommentary/Press-Releases/249220/Annual-Eversheds-Sutherland-Analysis-of-FINRA-Disciplinary-Actions-Shows-Huge-Surge-in-Financial-Sanctions?utm_source=vuture&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=vuture-emails March 8, 2022 Eversheds Sutherland has completed its annual study of the disciplinary actions reported...