In our travels to New York in the past year, we have learned much about the daunting challenges faced by regulatory compliance managers at banks and broker-dealers. Each month, these managers must: 1) keep track of scores of new rule proposals from dozens of agencies and SROs; 2) make sure their internal policies and procedures manuals properly reflect these changes; and 3) identify the appropriate people to take appropriate actions that these rule changes mandate.
Compliance managers also face additional hurdles, including: 1) agency and SRO audits; 2) internal workflow and communications inefficiencies; and 3) undercurrents of resistance based on the perception within their businesses that their role is to play "Dr. No" to more free-wheeling, danger-embracing "Bonds" in the trading and brokerage units.
The best kind of business start-up in the technology world is one that can ride in on its horse (hopefully not Big Brown) and offer meaningful solutions to significant problems at a reasonable cost. And that is exactly what we have done with our release today of KM PolicyWatch to the banking and broker-dealer communities (press release).
In the process of imagining and then building KM PolicyWatch, we met with dozens of Wall Street compliance mangers and harvested scores of suggestions about the kind of tool that could ease their burden and elevate their confidence in the compliance regime they are responsible for supporting. The stakes are high. We have learned that many banks and broker-dealers are barely able to keep their heads above water when it comes to their regulatory compliance burden. They are underfunded, undersupported, and underloved within their own institutions, and they need help. Thanks to their feedback and interest in KM PolicyWatch, we have build a compliance management platform that we believe can bridge each of those "gaps" for compliance and legal teams at banks and broker-dealers across the nation.
KM PolicyWatch is a platform known as "Software as a Service" (SaaS). The most famous and successful example of a SaaS platform is Software.com. SaaS can provide all of the benefits - and more - of traditional enterprise software, but at a small fraction of the price and with few of the implementation and consulting headaches associated with enterprise software.
KM PolicyWatch is a SaaS platform because we host a thin slice of internal compliance data for each for our customers. This thin slice allows each bank or broker-dealer to create a "map" that associates each rule change from more than 20 SROs and agencies with a particular section of any of their policy manuals. We update the rule changes on a daily basis. Based on the regulatory map for each organization, these rule changes flow through to the appropriate policy section and instantly alert the person responsible for managing that policy section.
Unlike competing compliance management tools, we do not require banks or broker-dealers to actually host each of their manuals on our servers. For this reason, KM PolicyWatch poses almost no security risks. KM PolicyWatch also provides comprehensive audit, reporting, and workflow features - all at a fraction of the cost of more traditional banking and broker-dealer compliance management solutions.
So from our perspective, the dawn has broken for a new day in compliance management. We are enormously excited to announce the launch of KM PolicyWatch because of the satisfaction that comes from building a product that we know can provide immediate and significant benefit to our customers. For more information, please feel free to write me (pschwartz@knowledgemosaic.com) or call us toll-free at 1.866.650.3600.
