Picture this: you’re the commander of a spaceship enterprise, navigating the far reaches of the universe. We all remember that show right?
So now you’re probably asking…what, exactly, does that have to do with compliance?
Turns out, a lot.
Compliance can feel as complex and far-reaching as the many multitudes of galaxies those space explorers were navigating.
And how were they able to navigate among the stars and planets effectively? With the right tools and technology. Which again brings us back to compliance and the kind tools you need to navigate rules, requirements, and mandates from the SEC, FINRA, state, DOL, and the list just keeps going.
In this blog, we’ll dig into the kinds of tools you need to manage the entire scope of your program and why (spoiler alert) having it all in one comprehensive command center – or platform – enables teams to proactively meet compliance requirements, removing silos, disparate workstreams, and overlapping priorities.
Firm-Wide Compliance Tools
Policies and Procedures/WSP Management
The Need: Your Policies and Procedures or WSPs are the backbone of your compliance program, shaping how your firm handles various processes, procedures, and critically, what to do in a case of non-compliance. Maintaining those documents and ensuring they are up to date with new rules, regulations, and requirements is one of the most critical aspects of complying with the SEC or FINRA.
The Tool: This tool should provide a structured means to update your critical documents with all necessary changes and provide a clear audit trail of said changes, allowing your team to provide regulators with at least 5 years of records for your manuals.
Marketing Review
The Need: Marketing materials are the best way to attract new clients and grow your business. Whether that’s a social post, email campaign, or simply a business card, your compliance team must be reviewing, tracking, monitoring, and recording those materials.
The Tool: Simply put, you need a way to track it all. From approvals, reviews, and edits to live posts. With such a variety of materials that count as marketing, relying on Excel simply won’t cut it.
MNPI Management
The Need: The flow of, access to, and management of your material nonpublic information (MNPI) can make or break whether your firm is raked across the headlines for charges of insider trading. Being able to diligently monitor and manage that information is one of the most critical necessities for compliance teams.
The Tool: For firms navigating complex deal flow or managing sensitive material nonpublic information (MNPI), especially in institutional or investment banking contexts, an integrated Control Room function is essential. It should provide real-time insight into wall crossings, enforce information barriers, and document potential conflicts in accordance with SEC Rule 10b-5 and relevant FINRA guidance.
Regulatory Filings
The Need: What’s one thing you can always count on in the world of compliance? Regulatory filings. Each year your team is tasked with managing numerous deadlines, countless details, and keeping it all straight amid the many other tasks on your plate.
The Tool: Trying to keep track of all your regulatory filing deadlines in your personal calendar is a recipe for disaster. Suddenly, that critical ADV update is lost among your countless meetings and the deadline has come and gone, leaving you in a lurch. A tool that can provide those critical reminders throughout the year among your other compliance tasks? Priceless.
Risk Assessments
The Need: Risk assessments provide your team with a critical analysis of potential gaps and compliance deficiencies in a more timely and focused manner than annual reviews. And while there are no specific rules regarding risks assessments, regulators expect you to be proactively scoping and remediating risks, especially when new rules and requirements come into play. In fact, the SEC has increasingly pointed to risk-based reviews in enforcement actions and examination letters as best practices.
The Tool: What makes a risk assessment effective? Thorough, consistent processes that ultimately provide a documented report on your key risks and the necessary steps to ensure proper compliance. While not explicitly mandated, the SEC and FINRA increasingly expect firms to demonstrate proactive risk scoping and mitigation in response to regulatory changes. Technology that automates risk scoring, maps risks to controls, and provides a change log across regulatory updates signals operational maturity to both examiners and investors.
Annual Reviews
The Need: Both the SEC and FINRA require firms to complete a comprehensive review of their programs at least annually, assessing the effectiveness of each facet of their compliance processes to ensure no erroneous mishap or accidental deficiency is creating compliance gaps.
The Tool: Your solution should enable comprehensive annual reviews with tasks throughout the year (so you don’t end up scrambling to complete it all come December 31). And the right solution? Will automatically document your review processes as you complete them, providing you with a comprehensive report come year end.
Books & Records
The Need: Your Books & Records are an archive of your entire compliance program and can be requested by the SEC or FINRA for multiple years back, acting as an audit trail what you did, didn’t do, and why. Both regulators mandate that firms preserve books and records for a specified amount of time, and more often than not, new rules include updates to books and records requirements, making this a key focus for examinations.
The Tool: One of the best tools for books & records? Archiving. Not only do archiving solutions enable your team to keep records in a format that meets regulatory standards, but it also means you don’t have to worry about a clogged desktop with all your critical documents and their many variations.
Employee Compliance
Registration and Licensing
The Need: Whether registering your Investment Adviser Representatives or Registered Representatives, ensuring your reps are registered and tracked within a system (and not an excel sheet) is critical to ensuring ongoing business with no disruptions.
The Tool: As your firm continues to grow so will the number of reps you’ll need to track, which means you need a scalable solution to track registrations and form updates.
Employee Trade Monitoring/Outside Business Activities/Political Contributions
The Need: The rules may be different, but the need is the same: Your firm must be tracking its reps’ personal trades, OBAs, and political contributions to ensure they align with the applicable rules and your associated policies. And even more importantly, you need a system to flag when any trades or activities occur that go against those policies.
The Tool: This solution should be able to not only provide your firm with an efficient preclearance process but give your compliance team the ability to flag undisclosed trades, contributions, and more – providing a 360-degree view of any risk associated with your reps’ trades and outside activities.
IAR CE
The Need: Per the NASAA Model Rules, reps in the adopting states must complete 12 hours of credits annually. But how are you tracking those credits and ensuring no business interruptions?
The Tool: Being able to provide your reps with accredited courses AND track their status on completing said course? Now that sounds like the solve for a growing firm.
Third-Party Compliance
Cybersecurity
The Need: Cyber threats have been a longstanding focus for both the SEC and FINRA, and as those threats continue to increase, regulators expect your program to scale appropriately.
The Tool: With the SEC’s 2023 cybersecurity rules now in effect for RIAs and funds, compliance and IT must collaborate on monitoring cyber risks, incident reporting, and policy documentation. A robust cybersecurity module should support breach reporting within 48 hours, audit policy attestations, and align with NIST and SEC frameworks to reduce the risk of examination findings or enforcement.
Vendor Due Diligence
The Need: The third-party risk landscape has come into the spotlight once again. Why? Because while third-party vendors provide firms with much need expertise and services, they can also come with additional risks. And the SEC and FINRA expect you to put the proper protocols in place to mitigate that risk
The Tool: Vendor Due Diligence solutions allow you to properly vet and continue to conduct ongoing due diligence to ensure no third-party vendor is opening your firm and its clients up to increased risks.
Bringing it All Together: The Benefits of 360-Degree Compliance
Phew, that’s a lot of tech to stack up. Which means a lot of firms? Are facing extreme tech bloat – likely slowing their processes and opening up the risk of siloes.
The real answer? One solution to power them all.
Think about it: Instead of spending your day logging into and out of systems, you gain a 360-degree view of risk across the firm. From books & records to MNPI and regulatory filings. You see it all.
But that’s not the only benefit. By leveraging one comprehensive platform you:
Unified Oversight Across the Entire Compliance Program
Managing compliance from a single platform provides a holistic view of risks, obligations, and task execution. It eliminates duplicative processes, reduces confusion, and ensures that nothing falls through the cracks—regardless of function or jurisdiction.
Greater Operational Efficiency Through Standardization
Centralization supports consistent workflows, shared documentation formats, and repeatable processes. This streamlines how teams manage recurring activities like risk assessments, policy attestations, or annual reviews—improving execution and scalability.
Enhanced Transparency and Accountability
A single platform enables real-time visibility into task status, ownership, and deadlines. Compliance leaders can easily track progress, surface bottlenecks, and provide regulators or executives with accurate, timely reporting on program effectiveness.
Reduced Risk of Gaps, Redundancies, and Non-Compliance
Disparate systems often lead to missed deadlines, duplicate controls, or inconsistent recordkeeping. A centralized model improves control design, ensures complete documentation, and reinforces a defensible posture in regulatory exams or audits.
Future-Ready Foundation for Program Growth and Regulatory Change
As the regulatory landscape evolves, a comprehensive platform allows firms to adapt quickly without reengineering their compliance infrastructure. It supports long-term program maturity by aligning people, processes, and policies within a flexible governance framework.
A Compliance Command Center – with COMPLY
In today’s fast-evolving regulatory environment, firms can no longer afford fragmented compliance workflows or siloed oversight. COMPLY Program Management acts as your Compliance Command Center — a single source of truth where your team can plan, execute, and evolve every aspect of your compliance program with confidence.
With COMPLY, you get:
✅ Real-time visibility into tasks, risks, and reviews across your entire firm
✅ Automated workflows that eliminate manual tracking and reduce operational friction
✅ Built-in regulatory expertise, keeping your program aligned with SEC, FINRA, FCA, and state rules
✅ Scalable support that grows with your firm, from daily operations to high-stakes exams
✅ Audit-ready documentation at your fingertips—no more last-minute scrambles
Whether you’re managing a team of two or twenty or twenty-two hundred, COMPLY helps you stay ahead of regulatory demands, reduce risk exposure, and operate with clarity and control.
Take command. Talk to a compliance expert today and see how COMPLY can streamline your entire program.