Hearsay Systems, the leader in compliant last mile digital communications for the financial services industry, today announced the appointment of financial services compliance veteran Iain Duke-Richardet as Compliance Strategy Principal. Duke-Richardet was an original member of FINRA’s Social Media Task Force, which provided industry input to FINRA’s initial guidance (FINRA Notice 10-06) regarding how financial firms and advisors should use social media.Fintech News
As Hearsay’s Compliance leader, Duke-Richardet and his team will guide Hearsay’s 100+ global financial firm clients around the ever-evolving regulatory landscape. He will be actively engaged with Hearsay’s product teams so Hearsay’s solutions continue to address new complexities as a strategic advantage to firms’ digital client experience initiatives. Such challenges range from establishing new operating models in response to COVID-19, to adapting to various regulatory developments specific to Wealth & Asset Management, Banking, Insurance and Mortgage verticals.
“As a former compliance officer at a large global bank, I have seen first-hand that regulatory compliance is one of the most challenging aspects of digital transformation for financial services organizations,” says Duke-Richardet. “Accelerated by COVID-19 and Reg BI, firms must rapidly adapt to new digital client engagement models, yet time and resources especially in compliance groups are stretched thin. As a longtime former Hearsay customer and user myself, I have personally experienced the breadth and depth of Hearsay’s commitment to compliance teams, and I’m thrilled to expand on this foundation, continue the company’s long-standing relationship with regulators like FINRA and FCA, and enable my peers who are compliance officers to play a strategic role in their firms’ digital transformation initiatives.”
Duke-Richardet is a widely recognized authority on global technology-related legal and regulatory issues. He joins Hearsay from Accenture, where he was a leader in the Regulatory & Compliance Practice and partnered with clients on a range of issues including regulatory change, regulatory reporting, technology-related legal and regulatory issues, cybersecurity, privacy, and communication and trading surveillance. Previously, Iain spent over a decade as a compliance officer and leader at global financial services firms including RBC Capital Markets, Lehman Brothers, Barclays Capital, and Goldman Sachs & Co.
“Compliance has always been a foundational pillar of our company’s products and services, as it is the price of admission in financial services,” said Clara Shih, CEO and founder of Hearsay Systems. “As a leading expert in emerging areas of compliance who literally helped write the social media regulatory rules in 2006, Iain will be a tremendous asset to our leadership team. As a Hearsay customer, Iain frequently had strong opinions about our compliance product direction and functionality, and I’m thrilled now that he gets to own this!”
Hearsay Offers Trusted Last-Mile Compliance Solutions Amid Uncertainty
From banking and wealth management to insurance and mortgage, financial services industries remain among the most highly regulated worldwide, and compliance is only becoming more complex with changing consumer expectations and enterprise implementations of new cloud and mobile technologies.
As financial services firms react to emerging guidance such as FINRA’s Notice 20-16 and economic shifts due to COVID-19, and introduce processes to comply with new rules including Reg BI set to go into effect on June 30, 2020, business-led control functions and Compliance teams must quickly adapt while continually becoming more efficient and accurate with the help of technology such as Hearsay’s Compliance Platform.
Hearsay’s Compliance Platform
To help financial services organizations cut through the noise and remain in compliance amid the challenging regulatory environment, Hearsay’s products and services deliver these core compliance benefits:
- Complete view of the client relationship: Context is critical when it comes to compliance – teams that leverage a single supervision platform across channels are able to administer programs most effectively, with maximum scale and efficiency. Reg BI puts additional emphasis on context, with obligations that require firms to have written policies and procedures to demonstrate their advisors are acting in their clients’ best interests. To meet these demands, firms and their compliance teams need platforms that automate recordkeeping across all communication channels. Hearsay makes this requirement simple by arming advisors with modern, digital channels designed to automatically capture client engagement activity and do so in context – including reporting of calls and text messages – offering a complete, unified view of the client relationship.
- Extensible approach that reduces cost, complexity and risk: To adapt alongside business and regulatory requirements, compliance teams should consider a modern, flexible technology ecosystem with strong governance and change management policies. Hearsay continually develops solutions that facilitate the industry’s best compliance practices while placing the compliance user-experience at the forefront. This includes integrating seamlessly with existing infrastructure and offering configurable workflows to make compliance programs more efficient and impactful.
- Scalable layers of defense to supervise suitability: At the center of any compliance team’s mandate is risk mitigation, and in particular putting policies in place to reduce the risk of regulatory penalty and censure. With Reg BI, the identification and prevention of messages – on any digital channel – that contain a recommendation is expected to be a policy and control that firms adopt. Hearsay bolsters firms’ overall compliance strategy by intelligently surfacing, tracking and remediating sensitive communications across its platform. This offers a modern defense layer for teams on the front lines of compliance so supervisors can focus on the highest-risk violations.
- Guidance, not just technology: Additionally, Hearsay offers professional advisory services partnering with customers to create customized compliance plans. Ultimately, Hearsay aims to make life simple for compliance teams, offering a platform purpose-built for compliance to supervise more efficiently and to collaborate more effectively with the business.
To learn more about how Hearsay can help your business prepare for Reg BI or overcome other compliance challenges, please visit https://hearsaysystems.com/solutions/compliance-supervision/.
