Executive Summary
Sunnyvale CA – July 23rd, 2020 Silicon Valley, CA based financial technology firm La Meer Inc (www.lameerinc.com) launches a complete solution for the SEC’s Regulation Best Interest for Wealth Management. Regulation Best Interest covers the entire broker-dealer and registered investment advisor market in the United States and obliges any advisor or dealer to act in the best interest of their client while disclosing conflicts of interest and financial incentives. In spite of the COVID-19 pandemic, the SEC went ahead with the compliance date of June 30th, and almost immediately started to perform “good faith” examinations to ensure that firms had taken their compliance obligations seriously.
La Meer’s GRACE for Regulation Best Interest
La Meer’s GRACE platform is a cloud-based, web, tablet and mobile-enabled platform, and for the Regulation Best Interest is unique in that it comprehensively covers all of the requirements of the four obligations of the regulation in an integrated but modular way. Featuring a client management portal, a compliance portal and a client portal, advisors and associated persons can interact with clients, exchanging information, approvals and portfolio information in real time and with the compliance department for suitability reviews. The powerful dashboards offered in each portal enables quick and easy visualization of information. When it comes to examinations firms will have a “single source of truth” to make examinations painless, and can help to demonstrate that the company really does what it needs to.
Being cloud-based, web, tablet and mobile-ready, GRACE enables everyone to work from where ever they are and at whatever time to ensure clients are managed in compliance, efficiently and effectively.
The modular nature of the GRACE platform allows firms to implement (and pay for) only the modules or functionality to address the particular area of immediate need and add other modules as they need them without additional vendors or integration costs. GRACE can also integrate easily with existing systems and data sources.
Firms may have fulfilled their Day 1 obligations of establishing their policies and procedures and sending out the Form CRS and may be considering their Day 2 process changes for continued compliance. GRACE provides the suite of functions needed to comprehensively comply for the long term.
GRACE’s Client Management Portal enables associated persons and client management staff have an easy to use way to:
- Gather client information and generate the client risk profile from easy to use risk assessment questionnaires and risk score the client;
- Perform product selection and portfolio creation in the client’s best interest from curated data, and offer alternate recommendations, record selection notes, and share them with clients and compliance for suitability;
- Share disclosures and marketing material with clients through email and via the client portal;
- Keep notes of all client interactions with the client and within the firm.
GRACE’s Compliance Management Portal establishes the oversight processes for the firm with functions for:
- Defining and managing policies and procedures to reflect all the expectations;
- Online attestation for all associated persons through configurable templates;
- Online training to staff and associated persons with ability to include custom training for the new processes in the organization;
- Conduct product and model portfolio governance to verify that all products being offered by the firm and their risk characteristics match and reflect the clients’ risk profiles and model portfolios. The curated information can be offered to client management staff for easy use in their portfolio creation function. This function also allows continuous oversight on the products based on client usage and changes in risk characteristics over time;
- Create and manage Client Risk Assessment Questionnaires for various client types and provide it to the Client Management staff on their portal for easy use;
- Manage Conflicts of Interest Repositories and their reporting to clients by offers an efficient way to identify, record and manage, mitigate and/or disclose appropriate conflicts to clients that may be impacted by those conflicts;
- Manage and Share Disclosure documents after internally review with associated persons for easy access to share with their clients. Proof of client receipt and acknowledgement from clients can be kept track of to ensure compliance;
- Conduct suitability review of products and portfolios created by associated. Clients and compliance can review and record their review notes leading to higher transparency. This data can used for ongoing review for violations and corrective action and be available for examinations;
- Periodic portfolio reviews should be conducted to ensure that the portfolios that were created and signed off with clients are indeed being adhered to for trading, and any new products and portfolio risks that arise over periods of time are monitored;
- Online forms for associated persons to request pre-trade approval and report gifts, political contributions, outside activity reporting, U4, U5 reporting, associated person registrations along with their review process allows monitoring of their activities;
- Personal trade monitoring, client trade allocation, trade monitoring, fees and billing monitoring ensures oversight;
- Client complaints can to be recorded, managed and addressed early and effectively.
GRACE’s Client Portal offers clients functionality to work with associated persons and the firm:
- To define their goals, objectives and preferences;
- Receive their product and portfolio recommendations and approve or disapprove of the selections made on their behalf;
- Receive and acknowledge disclosures;
- See their ongoing portfolio, trades, fees and billing;
- Record any complaints that they may have.
“The majority of broker-dealers and advisors may already be compliant with most of Reg BI expectations. GRACE provides clients the visibility to the organization’s standard of care and best interest behavior by including them in the decision making,” said Laxmi Ramanath, CEO at La Meer Inc. “By enabling associated persons, clients and compliance officers to interact whenever and where ever they are, whether they be working from the home offices or with a distributed workforce, the state of the art GRACE empowers staff to meet all the regulatory obligations of Reg BI comprehensively.”
To learn more about our GRACE Reg BI visit us at https://lameerinc.com/grace-client-management/ or write to us at info@lameerinc.com
About La Meer Inc.
La Meer Inc., founded in 2010, is a Silicon Valley firm that offers the GRACE Suite of products to addresses a variety of aspects of risk management, from operational risk, compliance management, client management, Trade Monitoring, AML, and IT Risk, Vendor risk and Operational due diligence to address world-wide regulations. Today La Meer is present in the US, Canada, UK and the EU, servicing clients throughout North America and Europe.
Our team comprises of people with deep subject matter knowledge and technology expertise in financial market regulations. Our experiences include working for major corporations including Citibank, Silicon Valley Bank, Deloitte and RBS.
GRACE offers comprehensive functionality specifically built to address regulatory needs in the financial segments of banking, asset management, capital markets, and institutional investments. Built on the market leading Oracle stack, availability, reliability, redundancy, resilience, data protection, and data privacy are all inherent in the platform. GRACE’s modular architecture allows firms to have the benefits of a custom solution delivered through configuration of the modules needed to suit their own requirements.
Press Contacts
For more information please contact
Laxmi Ramanath – laxmi@lameerinc.com
Matt Elton – matt.elton@lameerinc.com
