InvestEdge makes compliance a standalone offering

FWR Staff

5 February 2009

WM technology firm decouples re-vamped review tools from broader platform. InvestEdge, a firm that provides web-based wealth-management technologies to banks and large investment advisories, has made its recently updated Compliance Solution a standalone offering. The point is to help wealth managers meet increasingly stringent regulatory demands by equipping them to monitor and review portfolios systemically and in more detail than ever without tying them to InvestEdge's portfolio-management, trade-automation and performance-reporting offerings.

"Firms of all types are caught in a balancing act between complying with regulations and remaining competitive with their peers," says InvestEdge business-development head Jeff Cowley. "Because our compliance solution can be implemented very quickly, firms can rapidly decrease manual efforts, increase the accuracy of reviews, and simplify external and internal review processes."

InvestEdge's Compliance Solution is meant to replace error-prone manual processes commonly applied to account investment and administrative reviews for adherence to firm policies, individual client mandates and regulatory requirements -- including the need to meet exacting standards for managing and monitoring discretionary assets.

System neutral

In July 2008, InvestEdge started offering its new compliance-monitoring tools to banks and trust companies using SEI's trust-accounting and securities-processing platform.

The new standalone version works with other accounting systems such as those offered by Metavante, SunGard and Infovisa as well as SEI.

Using InvestEdge's Compliance Solution, investment advisors, account administrators, and compliance personnel can set-up, monitor and conduct investment and administrative reviews of portfolios. It comes with workflow features that help users to resolve issues identified by the system and serve as sign posts to guide users through approval processes. Overall, says InvestEdge, the Compliance Solution "complements and streamlines existing review procedures and makes it easier to comply with Reg. 9 requirements."

In this context, "Reg. 9" refers the OCC rules that govern the "fiduciary activities" of national-chartered banks in the U.S. In short, they say that OCC-regulated banks have to "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."

Bala Cynwyd, Pa.-based InvestEdge's counts Wilmington Trust, Glenmede Trust, TD Banknorth, and Merrill Lynch's Private Banking and Investment Group among its institutional clients. -FWR

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