Over the past few years, public accounting firms have invested in having financial institutions provide them files of holdings and transactions, which is commonly referred to as broker data import (BDI) and financial interest integration (FII). These files are then imported into their personal independence system to enhance ease-of-use and robust disclosure. By automating the import of brokerage data, compliance is increased dramatically and user satisfaction with the process goes up dramatically. To the extent that a process can be put in place to reduce the need for a user to log into a system and accomplish the goals of that process, the better. Also, by automating the process, disclosure of financial interests are automated. No longer are there situations where a person forgets to disclose - the system does it automatically every day. Regulators have been pushing organizations to move beyond policy to automated controls that provide compliance with the policy. Automatically importing the data is a powerful response.
Top Disclosure Challenges
While FII is essential, it cannot solve all disclosure challenges alone. We have complied the top five reasons for this situation.
What can be done?
The good news is that every financial institution provides financial statements on a periodic basis. These documents, while unstructured from a technical perspective (not a data file), are readable by our text analytics platform. For those financial institutions that fall into one of the categories above, a user of our system can upload their financial statement and the machine identifies the financial interest. With that information, our system then can do the same matching, rule comparisons, exception processing, and notifications that users are accustomed to receiving. Based on a configuration, the user could then be prompted to ensure that the statement for the financial institution be uploaded.
If you read my blog about the Inspection Module and the use of AI technology, the concept is the same. Plus, at our customer's option, the system can store the statements for use in the inspection process which means less work for the practitioner and stronger, more robust disclosure. The results are fewer violations of independence matters and happier users.
A few short years ago, none of this was possible. Now, we have the technology to read documents and create structured information that can be used for business processes. Call us for a demonstration of our text analytics and machine learning capabilities.
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