National Compliance Officer Day: A Holiday You Didn’t See Coming Every year, on September 26, the industry takes a collective bow toward the often unsung champions of organizational integrity: compliance officers. Yes, National Compliance Officer Day is a real thing, and no, you won’t find greeting cards for it in the Hallmark aisle. Let’s […]
Introduction Zoom in to August 2024: the SEC fines a New York adviser $1.25 million after examiners uncover pervasive “off-channel” business texts that were never retained. The order reads like a cautionary tale: senior staff used personal devices, records were missing, and document requests in an exam and investigation were hampered. The fix began […]
Intro: The Spreadsheet Fatigue Problem Quarter-end arrives, and the hunt begins: exports from three custodians, a maze of CSVs, manual VLOOKUPs, and a Slack thread where someone swears they already sent their attestation. Meanwhile, regulators keep publishing reminders that personal trading oversight is a live-wire priority. Just in 2024, the SEC sanctioned an adviser […]
A Different Kind of Rule Change Back in the day, adviser ads were simple. You’d find them in the Sunday paper, maybe with a black-and-white headshot and a few polite sentences about “trusted guidance for your financial future.” Nobody was tweeting about market outlooks or posting client reviews online because the technology didn’t exist. […]
There’s a particular kind of anxiety that’s hard to explain to anyone outside compliance. It’s not the fear of outright failure, but something quieter, more persistent… that gnawing sense that something, somewhere, has been overlooked. A message was unsaved. A conversation undocumented. A gray area left gray for just a bit too long. In 2025, […]
Over the past year, many advisory firms have been quietly preparing for a major regulatory shift. Drafting AML policies, vetting service providers, reworking onboarding flows—it’s been a slow burn of behind-the-scenes work for teams already stretched thin. That pressure eased slightly when FinCEN announced it would postpone its new anti-money laundering rule for investment advisers. […]
We’re proud to share that Smartria has been selected as the exclusive compliance platform within the Wealth Engineering Expert Sourcing Consortium—a highly regarded ecosystem serving 2,150+ top-tier wealth management firms across the country. Read the official press release here. This strategic partnership expands our visibility and reach, and more importantly, validates our mission: to make […]
Policies: Paperwork or Protection? As Bob Dylan wrote, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” You do, however, need a policy management system to prove your team knew what to do when the storm hit. And by the time the wind’s already blowing, it might be too late. In […]
For most founders, regulatory discussions don’t appear on the radar until something goes wrong: a delayed offering, a compliance snag, or a legal gray zone no one warned them about. But often, the most impactful policy decisions aren’t sweeping legislation—they’re quiet structural revisions made in committee meetings that receive little attention outside legal circles. That’s […]
Introduction: When A Routine Release Signals Structural Change SEC data releases are rarely splashy. Written in neutral tones, stripped of commentary, and often dropped mid-week with little amplification, they’re not designed to provoke headlines. But they are vital. For those who know where to look, these releases trace the fault lines of market structure […]
