Family Office
SEI upgrades fiduciary compliance offering to banks

Firm makes part of InvestEdge's ASP an option for its
bank-channel clients. SEI has selected InvestEdge -- a Bala
Cynwyd, Pa.-based maker of web-based technologies that help
wealth-management firms manage, monitor and report on
high-net-worth portfolios -- to offer enhanced
compliance-monitoring tools to banks and trust companies using
SEI's trust-accounting and securities-processing platform.
"One of our key reasons for partnering with InvestEdge is to
continue to help our clients to transition compliance from a
reactive event to a proactive process," says David Campbell, a
senior v.p. with SEI's Private Banking Solutions group. "The
InvestEdge compliance system equips firms to automate Reg. 9
review processes and more closely monitor accounts via daily
checks.
Title 12, Part 9
"Reg. 9" is an abbreviation of "Title 12, Part 9" of the U.S.
Code of Federal Regulations. It sets down OCC rules for
the "fiduciary activities" of national-chartered banks. Part 6 of
Reg. 9 stipulates that an OCC-regulated bank "conduct a review of
all assets of each fiduciary account for which the bank has
investment discretion to evaluate whether they are appropriate,
individually and collectively, for the account" -- and that's the
part most people in the industry mean when they mention Reg.
9.
SEI already has a suite of compliance capabilities, but it felt
that InvestEdge's Reg. 9 review processes provided a significant
upgrade for its clients -- and set InvestEdge apart from its
competitors.
"We conducted a due-diligence review of several firms and found
InvestEdge's capabilities to be the best," says SEI spokeswoman
Melanie Bayich.
Getting compliance part of its front-office technology suite in
front of SEI's 125 Private Banking Solutions clients is a big
opportunity for InvestEdge, which has 12 institutional clients
including Merrill Lynch's Private Banking and Investment Group,
Wilmington Trust, Glenmede Trust and Greycourt.
"SEI holds a dominant position in the bank and trust market,"
says InvestEdge's CEO and founder Bob Stewart. "To us this is a
special type of partnership."
But the tie-in between the investment-processing giant and the
much smaller front-office tech vendor isn't a prelude to a
takeover.
"SEI has no current or future plans to purchase InvestEdge," says
Bayich.
Stewart says that a merger simply "isn't part of the
conversation."
Nor does the deal prevent InvestEdge from providing its
system-agnostic technologies to banks using accounting platforms
other than SEI's. Stewart says it works equally well any trust-,
brokerage- or advisory-accounting system. -FWR
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