To mitigate this problem, Spring Labs, the intelligent AI powerhouse solution for financial services, announced Zanko ComplianceAssist.This new module builds upon the conversational intelligence capabilities of Spring Labs’ Zanko CustomerAssist, an AI copilot for fintechs, to dramatically reduce the time compliance professionals spend analyzing customer complaints, in addition to identifying high-risk and often hidden issues, and to efficiently enable corrective actions.

“Complaints are often viewed as negative, but they are actually the gateway to understanding how your customers feel about their experience with you as a financial institution. With Zanko ComplianceAssist, we help unlock the power of complaints by using AI to provide more granular and actionable insights,” says John Sun, CEO and Co-Founder of Spring Labs. “The benefits are much more than just cost savings. We hope to help our partners reduce regulatory risk, achieve better effective control over their fintech partners, and ultimately help the consumer be better heard when they speak to a financial institution.”

“We’re excited to be the first to partner with Spring Labs on a commercial application of AI which can benefit consumers and fintech partners alike. A crucial aspect of our business is providing quality oversight of complex and large-scale lending activities. Zanko ComplianceAssist helps our team identify insights and issues more quickly than we could on our own,” says Derek Higginbotham, CEO, First Electronic Bank. “Beyond just compliance, First Electronic Bank is committed to being early movers in exploring new uses of technology to improve how we serve consumers.”

“Complaints management is a critical component to an effective Compliance Management System and an important control over our fintech partner programs,” says Nissen Liddiard, EVP Compliance Officer, Celtic Bank. “Spring Labs’ Zanko ComplianceAssist product provides us with a useful tool to analyze complaint trends which allows us to better oversee our products and partners.”

“Zanko ComplianceAssist helps us assess the root cause of complaints at least 80 percent more efficiently, enabling us to resolve potential issues much faster,” says Jim Jackson, SVP Strategic Partner Oversight, WebBank. “This gives us greater peace of mind as we expand our channels for communicating with customers.”

By using AI to catalog, categorize and organize customer complaints, compliance professionals can slash the time they spend analyzing complaints by up to 65 percent. ComplianceAssist delivers automated classification, tagging, Voice of Customer (VoC) profiling, and root cause analysis, and can screen 100 percent of customer conversations to escalate the highest-priority complaints like deceptive advertising and fair lending, which customers can escalate to regulators if they’re not addressed properly and expeditiously.

“Ultimately, these advanced complaint analysis capabilities can help financial services firms scale their compliance processes to be more accurate, actionable, and effective,” continues Sun. “Zanko ComplianceAssist can be a key element in a firm’s growth plan, empowering compliance professionals with the invaluable tool they need to elevate their strategic contributions and role as ‘superheroes’ within their organizations.”

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Simultaneously with this transaction, Hg has bought out prior Ncontracts shareholder Gryphon Investors (“Gryphon”), as well as prior Venminder shareholders. Hg is a leading investor in software and services businesses and is backing Founder and CEO, Michael Berman, to lead the combined business, which promises to deliver more value to customers via these expanded capabilities.

Acquiring Venminder gives Ncontracts more depth and expertise in third-party risk management, further enhancing its position as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) and knowledge-as-a-service (KaaS) leader in enterprise risk management. The investment from Hg brings resources and expertise, continuing to strengthen Ncontracts as a leader in governance, risk and compliance (“GRC”) software solutions for banks, credit unions, mortgage companies, fintechs and registered investment advisors, as they grapple with increased risks and regulatory scrutiny.

“We are excited to join forces with Venminder,” said Michael Berman, Ncontracts Founder and CEO. “With our teams coming together to help reduce risk, improve compliance and control costs, we will continue to strengthen the financial industry and the communities they serve. With the investment and support from Hg, we are well positioned to continue our rapid growth. Gryphon has been a valuable partner, and I want to thank their outstanding team of operating partners, operating advisors and investment professionals.”

“Uniting Venminder and Ncontracts will bring tremendous value to our customers,” stated James Hyde, Venminder’s CEO. “This strategic partnership extends beyond third-party risk management, propelling Venminder into the broader integrated risk and compliance space. By combining our strengths, we are poised to deliver even more comprehensive and innovative solutions to our clients and the broader market. Our unwavering commitment is to continue to support our clients by guiding them through the complex landscape of third-party risk.”

Ncontracts has been named in the prestigious Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing private companies in America for the sixth consecutive year in 2024. This transaction will grow Ncontracts’ customer base further to over 5,000 customers. The investment and acquisition demonstrate Ncontracts’ commitment to continued growth from both an organic and inorganic perspective.

Alan Cline, Head of North America at Hg, said: “We see Ncontracts swiftly becoming a ‘gold standard’ provider of highly automated, AI-enabled, integrated software solutions for the financial industry. The merger with Venminder creates a compelling platform with a comprehensive product suite that can deliver significant value to customers.”

Alexander Johnson, a Director at Hg added: “We’re excited to partner with Michael Berman as he continues to lead and scale the company for its next stage of growth.”

Jon Cheek, Partner & Co-Head of the Software Group at Gryphon, said: “We are delighted to have completed a complex transaction that significantly transforms Ncontracts and positions it to continue to thrive. Through a combination of organic and inorganic growth strategies, Ncontracts has more than quadrupled in size since Gryphon originally invested in 2020. With its comprehensive suite of products meeting the continued demand for sophisticated financial services governance, risk and compliance management tools, the company is poised to continue that aggressive growth going forward.”

Gryphon sees continued attractive opportunity for new platform investments in the GRC sector and retains its investment in separate portfolio company RegEd, a leading provider of enterprise regulatory compliance solutions to insurance companies and financial services firms.

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Vena Copilot for FP&A combines Vena’s category-leading FP&A expertise with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service large language models, including GPT-4, to help FP&A teams and their collaborators increase productivity, operational efficiency, and business agility so they can focus on driving strategic impact.

Today, 75 percent of an FP&A team’s work is gathering data and administering processes. That stops now with Vena Copilot. Vena Copilot acts as an extension of the FP&A team, doing tactical work and producing insights using the most intuitive interface there is—natural language—to unlock everyone’s strategic potential.

With Vena Copilot for FP&A, teams can:

• Easily create and train a dedicated Complete Planning AI assistant that is built on their organizational knowledge and learns from feedback and preferences to get smarter over time.
• Gather data, generate reports, analyze trends, optimize forecasts and more, doing work that used to take hours in minutes with a simple prompt.
• Empower anyone to interact with data and insights quickly and easily using natural language, such as identifying seasonal patterns in revenue by product or identifying departments that have the highest in period actual to budget variances.
• Create a seamless flow of work alongside Copilot for Microsoft 365 only through Vena’s native integrations with Microsoft 365, from unlocking insights to visualizing data.

“Vena Copilot for FP&A is a game-changer for FP&A teams, empowering them to do more with less effort and better use of their resources,” said Hunter Madeley, CEO of Vena. “It’s not just a new tool, it’s a trusted ally that helps FP&A teams and their collaborators achieve their full strategic and operational potential, driving agility and resilience in the face of dynamic business conditions.”

Vena Copilot uses the combined power of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service advanced AI models including GPT-4—the largest and most powerful language model in the world—and Vena’s central analytical data model, CubeFLEX, enabling FP&A teams to put the power of generative AI to work across Complete Planning use cases and unique data sets.

Vena Copilot is also enterprise-ready, built with industry-leading generative AI enterprise security, compliance, and privacy capabilities driven by ethical principles, including role-based access controls and prompt compliance management. This allows FP&A teams to deploy Vena Copilot easily, safely, and responsibly within compliance requirements—no IT, data scientists, or AI engineers required.

“Vena Copilot for FP&A is the result of our close collaboration with Microsoft to bring together the best of both worlds: Microsoft’s world-leading AI technology and Vena’s deep FP&A domain expertise,” said Hugh Cumming, Chief Technology Officer, Vena. “By integrating Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service large language models with Vena CubeFLEX, we are giving our customers a powerful addition to their Vena Complete Planning solution that leverages their existing data, systems, and workflows and enables generative AI capabilities that are tailored to their specific FP&A requirements.”

“Vena’s use of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to create Vena Copilot for FP&A has resulted in a transformative generative AI assistant that empowers all teams to be more productive, efficient, and strategic,” added Sylvia MacPherson, National Unicorn Leader, Microsoft Canada. “This solution is a great example of how our partners are using Microsoft AI technology to build innovative and customized AI solutions that address specific business challenges and opportunities, and how Vena is transforming the strategic office of finance.”

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MCO provides compliance management software that enables financial services firms to reduce their risk of misconduct and maintain an ethical culture. MCO’s integrated SaaS platform lets compliance professionals demonstrate they are proactively managing the regulated activities of the company, employees and third-party relationships on a single risk and compliance platform.

“We’re thrilled to be acknowledged as a top participant in the global risk and compliance technology marketplace through the rigorous Chartis benchmarking and assessment process,” noted MCO CEO Brian Fahey. “MCO was founded with the mission of delivering an integrated technology framework for helping firms keep pace with stringent and evolving regulatory requirements. This honor is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the entire MCO team to deliver on that mission.”

The Chartis RiskTech100® is a comprehensive independent study of the world’s major players in risk and compliance technology. Rankings are based on functionality, core technology, strategy, customer satisfaction, market presence and innovation, and focus on solutions, industry segments and success factors.

In conversation with Chartis Research Global Brand Director Mark Feeley, MCO Chief Revenue Officer Dave Kubersky stated that “one of the great challenges of compliance is the large number of areas that firms need to be cognizant of. Regulators are looking to see that you have all of the baseline capabilities well-covered.” Watch their full exchange to hear more about how MCO helps firms assess trends across areas of compliance with a broad range of capabilities on an integrated platform here.

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With the impending release of the new SEC rule in October of 2023, and as 9 states have already rolled out their own cybersecurity regulations, Smartria’s Cybersecurity Focus is poised to revolutionize the landscape of cybersecurity compliance for RIAs.

“We developed Cybersecurity Focus to align seamlessly with forthcoming regulations,” said Mac Bartine, CEO of Smartria. “Our ultimate goal is to empower our clients with a truly comprehensive cybersecurity solution that not only protects their clients, but also their own firms. We aim to provide our client firms peace of mind by enabling them to effortlessly prove compliance with this vital yet complex new rule, which is currently creating uncertainty and concern within our industry.”

Unlike other cybersecurity offerings, Cybersecurity Focus has placed careful attention on matching the full demands of the SEC’s rule as it’s been proposed, delving deep into its intricate requirements and their underlying intent. The robust solution packages an array of pivotal components together, including:

• Cybersecurity Policies and Procedures Templates: Pre-designed templates meticulously aligned with regulatory standards, ensuring a solid foundation for compliant operations.
• Associated Compliance Workflows: Streamlined workflows that facilitate adherence to cybersecurity policies and procedures, minimizing administrative overhead.
• Cybersecurity Training and Phishing Tests: Interactive training modules and real-world simulation tests, bolstered by compliance documentation to fortify staff readiness.
• Vendor Due Diligence: A systematic approach to evaluating and monitoring third-party vendors to safeguard sensitive data.
• Employee Access to Data and Incident Reporting and Tracking: Tools to manage employee access, bolster incident reporting mechanisms, and facilitate swift responses to potential threats.
• IT, Device, and Cloud Surveillance and Reporting: Comprehensive surveillance of IT infrastructure, devices, and cloud systems, delivered by CybersecurRIA to be reportable within Smartria.

“Securing sensitive information and maintaining cybersecurity has never been more critical in today’s fast-evolving landscape,” said Jonathan Addington, President of CyberSecureRIA. “We founded CyberSecureRIA to secure and support RIAs, and we’re thrilled to partner with Smartria to help enhance cybersecurity and compliance protection for more advisors and their clients.”

Smartria’s commitment to addressing the core tenets of compliance for RIAs extends beyond Cybersecurity Focus. The company’s visionary approach seeks to furnish RIAs and hybrid RIAs with comprehensive solutions that span the entirety of compliance management, with cybersecurity compliance as a much-needed new pivotal cornerstone to reducing risk for RIAs and their clients.

Cybersecurity Focus is available as a full package for $399/month, with individual components able to be purchased separately

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Celent evaluated 40 software providers worldwide with the final report featuring 17 profiled vendors. Celent used its proprietary ABC methodology to position companies across three dimensions: Advanced Technology, Breadth of Functionality and Customer Base and Support.

As a result of shifts in technology and the supplier landscape, half of the systems profiled in Celent’s AML TM systems report were developed by new entrants over the past five to ten years. LexisNexis Risk Solutions began offering AML TM when it launched its RiskNarrative platform in late 2022 shortly after its TruNarrative acquisition earlier in the year.

“The supplier landscape has expanded dramatically with the addition of numerous new regtech entrants offering digitally-enabled solutions,” said Neil Katkov, Ph.D, Risk Director at Celent. “The AML TM solution from LexisNexis Risk Solutions is differentiated by its no code platform and AI-based process automation to support fincrime workflows. RiskNarrative earned high marks to place them squarely in the Functionality Standout category.”

RiskNarrative is a customer lifecycle management tool specializing in financial crime compliance and fraud prevention. It leverages core technology, capabilities from the company’s Dynamic Decision Platform and alternative, third-party services to prevent fraud at the point of application. It allows customers to do this via a single, unified platform utilizing a highly intuitive and easy-to-operate user interface for all financial lifecycle journeys with simple integration and no coding.

Ryan Morrison, vice president of platform strategy, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, said, “We are thrilled with this recognition by Celent as it signifies the success of our team’s dedication and work to bring a cutting-edge transaction monitoring solution to market so quickly. We fully intend to take this solid foundation and tirelessly innovate the platform and grow its services to meet customers right where they need it. Customers around the world are already benefiting from our capabilities within a platform that makes risk management as easy to use as a drag-and-drop application. I’m looking forward to seeing how this platform continues to evolve.”

Key RiskNarrative platform benefits:

• Helps customers and businesses comply with regulations and protects against fraud.
• Clearly demonstrates AML controls and regulatory compliance to regulators.
• Integrates transaction monitoring with risk scoring at onboarding and ongoing throughout the customer journey, enabling a true single customer view.
• Manages transactional risk effectively across the full customer lifecycle.
• Creates and customizes transaction monitoring strategies, journeys and rulesets easily and as required with reduced reliance on technical support.
• Eliminates irrelevant referrals and alerts, using the virtual agent machine learning algorithm.
• Dynamic risk and compliance management with a more complete view of all transactions.

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“Working closely with Avalara will enable us to remove unnecessary friction and inefficiencies in tax compliance by automating tax processes for our joint customers,” said Rondy Ng, EVP of Applications Development at Oracle. “With Oracle Cloud ERP, organizations can embrace automation and continuous innovation to increase productivity, reduce costs, and improve controls.”

Jayme Fishman, EVP and GM of Indirect Tax at Avalara, added, “Avalara aspires to be part of every transaction in the world with our global compliance platform. We’re getting there more rapidly thanks to collaborators like Oracle who are integrating our solutions to simplify the most complex processes of every sale or purchase transaction — calculating taxes and filing the returns.”

With Avalara embedded in Oracle Cloud ERP, manual indirect tax setup, configuration, calculations, and complexities from every transaction are removed — saving businesses valuable time and lowering their overall risk of calculating taxes incorrectly or filing the wrong returns. Additional benefits include:

• Integrated compliance services: With Oracle Cloud ERP, customers can integrate core parts of the Avalara offering within hours, reducing implementation time by weeks. Fully automated tax compliance management leverages up-to-date tax content for more than 900,000 tax rules across more than 30,000 tax jurisdictions to maximize accuracy of tax calculations. In addition, a single dashboard enables simple and efficient tax return preparation and filing.
• Access to end-to-end compliance services: A single Oracle Cloud ERP integration provides access to critical compliance capabilities, like tax calculations and reporting. Customers will also have access to additional compliance solutions, including exemption certificate management, business licensing, cross-border compliance, e-invoicing, and more. This allows businesses to easily scale their automation to address new and expanded compliance obligations.
• Tax solutions powered by intelligent automation: The Oracle Cloud ERP integration gives customers seamless access to Avalara’s artificial intelligence-powered compliance solutions to enhance the product experience and streamline tax management. Today, Avalara leverages AI to enable customers to automatically detect and extract data from exemption certificates, automate mappings of Harmonized System (HS) and tax codes, and more.

Avalara and Oracle have collaborated since 2013 to alleviate the burden of tax compliance and to support growing businesses by automating mandatory regulatory requirements.

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In an intensely competitive and highly regulated industry, financial services firms continue to ramp up sales and marketing initiatives, resulting in an influx of materials requiring compliance review. “RegEd’s Enterprise Advertising Review enables our clients to speed up the approval process, eliminating compliance bottlenecks and delivering competitive advantage in the form of speed to market for review items,’ commented Ethan Floyd, RegEd’s Chief Product Officer.  ‘Our solution has been proven to reduce review time by more 50%, and in some cases up to 80%, while improving accuracy and consistency.”

Enterprise Advertising Review’s advanced features include Lexicon Detection, which automatically flags problematic keywords and phrases. SMART Disclosures and Document Compare capabilities integrate AI technology to automate elements of compliance reviews, while significantly reducing the risk of non-compliance. The solution also offers a streamlined user experience, complex hierarchy management, advanced indexing and search, and FINRA AREF integration.

Mark Mashewske, Principal Product Manager for Enterprise Advertising Review, notes “complying with advertising regulations is a significant challenge for financial services firms, particularly large firms that need to process thousands or even tens of thousands of submissions annually while avoiding fines and penalties. This is an enormous undertaking and our solution reduces that burden on compliance teams so that they can keep pace with growing demands to support sales and marketing efforts.”

RegEd’s Enterprise Advertising Review delivers unparalleled efficiency-driving capabilities and can be easily integrated with a firm’s marketing automation system, automating advertising compliance management through all phases and accelerating campaign launches. The solution can also be integrated with a firm’s larger technology ecosystem.

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AuditBoard’s dedication to innovation continues to drive enthusiastic responses from customers as it delivers new purpose-built solutions for the challenges facing audit, risk, and compliance teams. The launch of AuditBoard TPRM, a powerful new solution that expands platform capabilities to include the management of third-party risk, has been overwhelmingly well received by customers, whose top ratings have led to the recognition of AuditBoard as a Leader in G2’s Third Party & Supplier Risk Management Software category.

“We are thrilled that AuditBoard is again being recognized by G2 and our customers for our innovative, purpose-built solutions,” said AuditBoard Chief Marketing Officer John Reese. “We were founded to improve the lives of practitioners, and we’re grateful that our customers continue to vocalize the substantial and increasing value they get from the AuditBoard platform.”

This recognition reflects AuditBoard’s accelerating market momentum, and follows the company’s recent naming of accomplished SaaS executive Roxanne Oulman to its board of directors just months after it announced surpassing $150 million in annual recurring revenue. AuditBoard’s top rankings come on the heels of being named a 2023 Top 100 app, amongst more than 100,000 apps across all categories and industries, in G2’s prestigious Best B2B Software Awards. AuditBoard TPRM was also recently recognized with a 2023 Global InfoSec Award from Cyber Defense magazine, further cementing its status as a rising star solution in the space.

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Conduct is a focal point of regulatory scrutiny and regulators worldwide have become more aggressive in investigating and bringing enforcement actions, fines, and sanctions against firms with inadequate compliance procedures and systems. With SURVEIL-X Holistic Conduct Surveillance, financial institutions can analyze and correlate all trade related data, providing comprehensive surveillance coverage for their regulatory needs. By breaking down barriers between data silos, financial institutions gain deeper analysis and true risk detection.

“With its AI-powered SURVEIL-X Holistic Conduct Surveillance solution, NICE Actimize brings next level conduct and risk detection capabilities with even better detection coverage, reduced false positives, and the ability to monitor unified communications,” said Chris Wooten, Executive Vice President, NICE. “As we continue to grow our conduct and surveillance market share across Europe, we thank the RegTech Asia Insight Awards community for acknowledging the innovation in our Conduct solution.”

“Congratulations to NICE Actimize for winning the ‘Best Solution for Managing Conduct Risk’ in this year’s A-Team Group RegTech Insight Awards Europe. These awards celebrate leading RegTech solutions, services and consultancies across Europe which demonstrate exceptional creativity in building solutions that solve regulatory challenges,” said Angela Wilbraham, CEO of A-Team Group.

The 2023 RegTech Europe Insight Awards honored leading technologies and vendors in a range of regulatory technology categories. The RegTech Europe Awards evaluation criteria for shortlisting considered depth of involvement in capital markets, and the potential interest of a solution or service to the publications’ RegTech community.

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