The 3 Top Issues at Industry Events Now
The recent conferences highlighted that unsupervised electronic communications — in whatever form — is top of mind for compliance professionals. Not surprisingly, this shift to electronic channels has also caught the attention of financial services regulators.
At the beginning of the year, each regulatory priorities letter included some reference to unsupervised communications. As evidence of this, regulators have expanded their examinations with respect to unsupervised communications, and investigations are ongoing and expanding.
All of this is happening under the specter of increasingly larger and more frequent enforcement actions by regulators.
The pressure on compliance will only continue to increase from organizations’ business side to open up their social programs. But the fear of regulatory action is creating pause as teams seek solutions to mitigate this very real risk. In many cases, this pause can leave money on the table while this glut of new entrants develop relationships with other financial institutions.
At the SIFMA conferences, attendees sought to balance their desire to construct social selling programs through online relationship-building without provoking the ire of regulators. Meanwhile, at FINRA’s annual conference, the session on regulatory trends was standing room only, with attendees lining the walls.
During that session, which was held on the morning of the announcement of a $1 billion fine, we heard some heated commentary from the panelists, which furthered the audience’s concerns. And at ALIC, it was clear that firms needed to leverage technology vendors to supervise this type of activity in a scalable way.
Compliance will continue to be one of the biggest issues financial firms and representatives face. They want to do the right things – for their business and their customers — within a changing regulatory and compliance landscape. In such efforts, conferences play a key role in sharing best practices.
Learning from one another, digital client communications can improve, thus nurturing trust and strengthening relationships, while staying on the right side of regulations.
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A 15-year compliance veteran in financial services, Bill Simpson is the Compliance Principal at Hearsay Systems.
(Image: Adobe Stock)
