Compliance Questionnaires

Broker-dealers must demonstrate compliance in accordance with FINRA’s Supervision Rule. Integral to that process is the annual certification of the registered representative population, where each representative must attest to their continued good standing or alert supervisors and compliance stakeholders to any deficiencies.

Today, many firms conduct this process using suboptimal tools, often a combination of paper, email and general purpose technology. The result is an inefficient and elongated cycle that requires representatives to undertake a separate process to confirm that the profile and compliance information held by FINRA is accurate. This confirmation process often requires the representative, their supervisors and compliance and other stakeholders to communicate over lengthy email threads regarding any anomalies. A common challenge, and one that poses material risk to the firm, is the inability to readily identify and address deficiencies before they can cause the firm harm. For firms with thousands of registered representatives, it’s akin to looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.

RegEd’s Compliance Questionnaires provides a robust set of integrated, workflow-driven, enterprise tools that enables firms to initiate, distribute and track annual compliance questionnaires required by FINRA, and other critical questionnaires integral to maintaining a strong compliance program. The solution enables stakeholders to identify and analyze deficiencies and outliers and report on the results. Using the system’s risk-based flagging tool, key stakeholders can easily identify, prioritize, address and report on critical compliance deficiencies, using a weighted ranking.

The solution is fully configurable. Questionnaires can be specifically designed to meet the firm’s requirements. The intuitive user interface enables registered representatives to easily access and complete their assigned questionnaires. Notifications are automatically sent to the registered representative population, their supervisors, and other reviewers, to notify them of the attestation requirements.

Compliance Questionnaires is an enterprise application and part of RegEd’s Compliance, Audit and Conflicts of Interest Management Platform. The solution leverages the platform’s robust workflow engine, enabling the firm to design complex workflows that mirror their best practices, and include multiple reviewer, approval and sign-off stages. Compliance Questionnaires seamlessly integrates with FINRA’s WebEFT, enabling registered representatives to affirmatively attest to the accuracy of their U4 data on file.

In addition, the solution provides a comprehensive dashboard where administrators can view the current status of all required questionnaires and attestations and readily identify deficiencies and overdue items.