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September 17, 2020

illumis Compliance - Fall Product Update

This summer we’ve continued to build out powerful tools on our political contribution compliance platform to better serve our customers. Today, we’re excited to share three big features we added to the illumis platform:

Automatically Populate Candidates in Preclearance. Dynamic integrated candidate data simplifies the preclearance process for employees, and helps ensure that you get clean and consistent data on candidates, committees, offices, and jurisdictions. This cuts down on research times, produces more accurate data, and provides a much better employee experience. Even better, having consistent candidate data will enable automated preclearance rules.

Automated Matching Between Preclearance and Monitoring Records. With your monitoring and your preclearance data in the platform, illumis will automatically match new monitoring records to the corresponding preclearance records, and notify you of those that aren’t matched. This makes it easier to understand potential exceptions, and helps streamline and simplify reconciliation processes

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Rule-Based Workflow Automation - Create new rules to easily automate processes. For example, you can automatically update the statuses of records that are matched. When a record that was precleared is matched with a newly detected monitoring record, that record will automatically have its status updated to ‘precleared’. These sorts of workflow rules can help save your team time managing the data in the platform.

We’d love to share more, and see if the platform might be a good fit for your team. If you’d like more information, please contact us using the form below.
Why real-time data is essential to helping your investment firm avoid violating pay-to-play regulations, SEC rule 206(4)-5

Political contributions made by firm employees pose a significant threat to investment advisory firms. And even firms with the best compliance teams can be at risk of violating pay-to-play regulations, like the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) rule 206(4)-5, given the complexity of the rules and the myriad of regulations to which firms must comply.

Because of this, investment firms must arm themselves with the access to and support of real-time data, which can help identify potential violations and anomalies in the political donation process.

By leveraging real-time data, investment firms can quickly detect suspicious or unauthorized activities and take prompt action to prevent pay-to-play violations.

Beyond SEC Rule 206(4)-5: A look at state and local political contributions compliance regulations

SEC Rule 206(4)-5 is arguably the most well known regulation regarding political contributions compliance or pay-to-play compliance. However, it certainly isn’t the only regulation to which firms must comply.

In fact, beyond federal regulations, firms which take part in government contracted work must contend with numerous and varied state and local regulations as well. Such regulations present unique challenges because of the various requirements within each, which should they be neglected, can cause significant financial and reputational damage.

Aligning pay-to-play rule 206(4)-5 compliance practices with your investment firm’s regulatory compliance program

While it would be almost too easy to treat the Securities and Exchange Commissions’ (SEC) pay-to-play rule 206(4)-5 as a special requirement implemented only during election years, that mistake can cause serious, firm-wide damages. In fact, for investment firms, establishing a compliance program which actively and regularly incorporates compliance with the SEC pay-to-play rule is essential to avoiding fines, sanctions, lockout periods, loss of revenue and a damaged reputation.