Mitch Avnet, CEO and Managing Partner here at Compliance Risk Concepts, had the privilege of moderating a session on “Compliance Trends in Advisor Communications” at Hearsay Summit this year. The session was well attended by compliance officers from enterprise wealth management and insurance companies whose respective organizations have taken a careful, thoughtful and pragmatic approach to enable advisors to communicate with clients and prospects over multiple channels.
Mitch’s goal for the session was to create a collaborative environment that offered the following:
Throughout the session, one common theme continually emerged – “There is no competitive edge in compliance.” As compliance officers, we all benefit from sharing ideas and thought leadership with one another. As a result, we are able to create cohesive and consistent approaches to common problems shared across our respective organizations. Creating best practices together, for our industry as a whole, instills confidence on the part of our regulators. As we all know, regulators like standards; when firms approach compliance for the technology solutions we use to fulfill our compliance responsibilities in a common manner, we’re all better off.
I was truly impressed with the proactive steps many of the participant organizations are taking with respect to enabling social media for advisors. This included a close collaboration with marketing departments and the creation of workflows that enabled efficient processes specific to creation and/or curation of marketing materials approved for advisor dissemination over social media. Many organizations were beyond “pilot” social media rollouts and had either fully implemented an enterprise approach and strategy for social media, or were well on their way.
From a pure compliance perspective, participants indicated their workloads had only increased incrementally due to the use of technology (in this case, Hearsay) to aid in the creation of the appropriate workflows and approval processes. As we all know, this can be a huge gating issue when organizations are contemplating the net effect of enabling new and different approaches to advisor communications. This is extremely encouraging since it’s coming straight from the compliance officers/people in the trenches actually using this technology on a day-to-day basis, not the vendor trying to sell their solution.
For more takeaways, read the full Hearsay Social article Hearsay Social article Compliance Trends in Advisor Communications – Summit 2019 Takeaways
