Removing Inefficiency in Personal Independence Financial Disclosures

Personal independence is critical for regulatory compliance as well as meeting professional standards, however, the task of manually entering holdings into an application to confirm independence can be time consuming. For example, if a partner has 100 investments and needs to enter all manually, that can take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes. Firms need to minimize the amount of time partners and other practitioners spend disclosing the information, but still keep compliance at the forefront of their minds. Financial relationship data automation, also known as Broker Data Import (BDI), is essential to meeting this goal.  

Alex Olson has written about the Broker Data Import (BDI) component of our Personal Independence application used by auditing firms to continually assess their independence. This component facilitates the automation of the once manual holdings disclosure process. This automated disclosure process requires Kingland to interact with many different brokers to receive raw data files in which we then transform and process into our personal independence application. The application then knows the holdings for each account comparing each of those holdings against the client's restricted or prohibited entity list. 

We update and add new brokers to this component of our application frequently in order to continue to simplify this holdings disclosure process for the partners and practitioners at these auditing firms. Because of this, we have found that certain back office tasks have become very time consuming and require much more administration than is likely desired. One of the back office tasks required for this process is an authorization form that the account holder is required to sign in order for the financial institution to send over the account data. This process can create a lot of additional work for the administrators since they need to ensure that the forms are signed, gathered together, and sent to the financial institution.  

At a scale of thousands of individuals, the process can be a tracking nightmare when determining which forms have been filled out and which ones still need to be sent to a financial institution.

Optimize at a Lower Cost

In order to streamline and simplify this process, Kingland created a solution to put this work into our personal independence application. Our new solution automates this process by allowing the account holder to upload a signed form in the application. By doing so, the application records the user's action in completing the task. Next, the system collates the completed forms each time and automatically sends them to the correct broker. The benefits reach several types of users. 

Partners and practitioners have a better experience due to the enhanced transparency and simplicity instead of dealing with communication outside of the application. They simply follow the process in the application. 

Administrators can focus on exceptions and the administrative cost is reduced. The system automatically tracks the status of authorizations. No manual work is necessary. 

As you consider how to optimize the disclosure of financial instruments, we recommend that you consider Kingland's continued automations. If you are curious about the process, feel free to reach out to me directly or use the contact us portion of the website.