To address recently passed SEC regulation, NICE Actimize, has introduced Reg BI Surveillance for broker-dealers to manage compliance obligations, which include: providing timely disclosures to retail clients; exercising diligence (care) in making investment recommendations in line with each client’s best interest; and maintaining and enforcing compliance procedures.
Chris Wooten, executive vice president, NICE, said in a statement, “Reg BI is the most significant change to suitability regulations in the United States in the past twenty years. Now, firms must monitor all broker-dealer recommendations through the lens of this new regulation. This places an enormous compliance burden on firms that would be difficult to overcome with today’s disjointed technologies and manual processes.”
Available both on-premise and in the cloud, Reg BI Surveillance taps into the firm’s sales practices and suitability, communications surveillance and case management capabilities to help broker-dealers with:
Disclosure: using Intelligent Analytics powered by machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP), Reg BI Surveillance monitors and reviews all broker-dealer communications (e-mail, voice and attachments), automatically identifies communications containing recommendations, and then analyzes prior communications to determine if proper disclosures were made and presented in compliance with the regulation. Risky communications are automatically flagged, scored and prioritized for review. With the click of a button, analysts can see disclosure compliance scores and also review every communication leading up to a recommendation or trade.
Care: Reg BI Surveillance leverages powerful out-of-the-box analytics that can detect prohibited sales practices, and analyze transaction risks, rewards and costs to determine if the broker-dealer is acting in the client’s best interest. Complete communications and transaction data are automatically correlated and instantly available for each alert. Reg BI Surveillance even features a ‘Best Product Alternative’ analytics model which highlights more suitable products the broker-dealer could have recommended based on the client’s profile.
Compliance: using Reg BI’s case management capability, firms can create standardized workflows to manage Reg BI compliance enterprise-wide (complete with audit trails) and have one place for managing alerts and investigations. By automating compliance processes around Reg BI, NICE Actimize’s Reg BI Surveillance solution provides a foundation for standardizing procedures and ensuring they are followed.