On June 5, 2019, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) passed Regulation Best Interest (“Reg BI”). BDs will be required to act in the best interest of their retail customers when recommending any securities transaction or investment strategy. As part of Reg BI, BDs and registered investment advisers (“RIAs”) will be required to provide retail investors with a Form CRS Relationship Summary which discloses the nature of the relationship between the entities and their customers.
Given the tone of the business plan with regards to financial crime, and a reiteration of its focus on firm governance and culture, it is no surprise that the assessments by the FCSST focussed on 6 areas. If the indications from the documents requested by the FCSST, and the interviews that took place during the onsite portion of the assessment, are anything to go by, it is clear the FCA is following through on its intent to be more intrusive.
Although there are political signals that our current administration will provide financial institutions regulatory enforcement relief in comparison to years prior, this is not the case. As evidenced by the consistent penalties enforced over the past several years, AML/BSA regulatory enforcement remains a top priority. Examples include severe civil monetary penalties now being issued to mid-size and small financial institutions, jurisdictions imposing mandatory certification programs for compliance personnel, and compliance violations resulting in civil prosecution and debarment for compliance executives.
ACA's Spring 2019 Compliance and Performance Conference was held May 8-10 at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami, Florida.
Claiming compliance with the Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS) is gaining significant traction with credit asset managers due to the increased demand from institutional investors.
Is your firm prepared for the SEC's new cyber focus areas for 2019? Find out what your firm needs to know, and what you can do to prepare.
Vendor risk management can be painful, time-consuming, and expensive. Get the secret ingredient to capture the full range of vendor risks in our latest blog post.
More and more, regulators are examining AML and terrorist financing monitoring software solutions to see if they are tuned correctly; and citing financial institutions who fail to meet the regulatory standards. One issue for both regulators and these institutions is the creation of excessive volumes of “false positive” activity alerts, or alerts on activity that after evaluation, is not determined to be suspicious.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (“OCC”) recently issued its Spring 2019 Semiannual Risk Perspective, a recurring report of key risk areas and emerging threats to the federal banking system that are monitored by the OCC's National Risk Committee. In this blog post, we summarize the risk areas that impact banking asset management groups, and operational risk, strategic risk, and BSA/AML.
On May 23, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE) issued a Risk Alert regarding the security associated with cloud and network data storage solutions.
ACA Compliance Group is pleased to present their newest survey results in the form of a white paper, 2019 Liquidity Risk Management Program Rule Survey Results.
The FCA recently published the conclusions of its review of principal firms in the investment management sector. We examine the relevance of the findings and outline how the FCA rated Mirabella in the review.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has commenced a series of cybersecurity examinations on registered investment advisers (RIAs) which targets Form ADV data related to cloud service providers.
FINRA recently issued Regulation Notice 19-18 (the “Notice”), which provided guidance to member firms regarding their monitoring obligations with respect to suspicious activity pursuant to the Bank Secrecy Act (“BSA”) and anti-money laundering (“AML”) requirements.
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