What is your firm’s top priority? Is it bringing in new customers, delivering a great experience, increasing revenue, or something else?
These goals are great business objectives, but they overlook an essential firm priority: compliance. When compliance is your firm’s top priority, it impacts growth, retention, and experience.
Compliance is foundational to everything your firm does. If a firm is out of compliance, it puts clients’ information at risk, risks its reputation, and potentially spends additional time and money getting things in order again. But when compliance is a key feature of your firm, things run more smoothly, and clients know they can trust you with their personal information.
Compliance should be your firm’s top priority. But how can you make that happen, especially if other priorities already exist?
Create a Compliance-Centric Culture
As a top priority for your firm, compliance should be part of every employee’s everyday thought processes and actions. Every employee, regardless of their role within the firm or interaction with clients and data, must understand the importance of compliance and their responsibility for ensuring the firm follows regulations. When compliance is part of regular conversation and advisors understand the why behind the rules, it becomes part of a firm’s culture.
Leaders who understand the importance of compliance set the tone for the rest of the firm. Many firms hire a Chief Compliance Officer or delegate another role to lead compliance efforts. Just like you would likely assign someone to manage the firm’s other priorities like client retention, sales, and operations, you need to assign a person or team to lead the charge for compliance. Their job is to champion compliance and empower all employees with the resources they need.
Making compliance your firm’s top priority requires regular training, especially with regulations changing frequently. Sharing regulatory changes and updates at all-hands meetings, posting updates and compliance reminders throughout the office and in the firm’s internal communication network, and hosting specialized training sessions throughout the year are all ways compliance becomes integrated into a firm’s DNA.
Incorporate Compliance into Established Processes
One of the biggest roadblocks to full compliance is that it often seems like another box to check or hoop for advisors to jump through. But when compliance is a top priority, it supersedes other processes and becomes the first thing on the list. Making that happen is much easier when compliance is integrated into existing processes.
Firms typically have numerous processes for various accounts and projects, including client onboarding, information gathering, new account opening, and more. Each of these actions also has correlating regulations to follow, such as Know Your Customer, Anti-Money Laundering, and Books and Records. Integrating compliance into existing processes means that as back office staff and advisors go through these processes, they continually check that they comply. They don’t wait until after onboarding to gather and verify a client’s information because it is an established part of the process.
Integration helps compliance become essential to every action your firm takes instead of an afterthought.
Invest in Compliance-Focused Technology
Investing in compliance technology also showcases that your firm truly cares about compliance. It isn’t just something you say is a priority — it’s somewhere you are willing to invest for the good of clients and employees.
Compliance technology has countless benefits, including speeding up the verification process, managing documents properly, connecting the proper documents with the right clients, automating repetitive data entry tasks, and many more. Technology makes it easier to stay compliant, which empowers advisors to follow regulations without sacrificing time spent building client relationships.
Digital tools make it easier for firms to continually stay in compliance without having to rush to find crucial documents before an audit. Technology allows firms to collect and manage client information more easily, streamlining compliance efforts and storing information in one central location instead of spreading it across disconnected systems. Compliance-focused technology empowers advisors to follow regulations without sacrificing time spent building client relationships.
Making compliance your firm’s top priority not only sets you apart from the competition but establishes you as a client-focused firm that values data security. With regulations changing frequently, prioritizing compliance is no longer just a nice thing to do — it’s a requirement for firms to stay relevant.
One of the best tools to help streamline compliance efforts is Docupace, the leader in cloud-based document management. Click here to learn more about Docupace and schedule a free demo.
