SEI, the Oaks, Pa.-based asset manager and technology provider, has introduced its new global regulatory risk and compliance platform, which it characterizes as centralizing the “handling of an investment firm’s regulatory and compliance functions across investment vehicles, products, and jurisdictions around the globe.”
The platform was developed by SEI’s investment manager services (IMS) division, to “help its diverse investment manager clients rein in the escalating costs and risks resulting from the industry’s fast-rising tide of regulations,” according to an SEI statement.
The new compliance platform is “not limited to clients of its operating services,” says SEI, and it will “import data for non-client firms, allowing them to take advantage of the platform regardless of where their fund accounting and administration functions are serviced.”
The platform’s key components include:
- An inventory of regulations in the jurisdictions where an investment manager operates and organizes its products;
- Compliance program assessment and monitoring against the evolving regulatory inventory, including a detailed best-practice analysis of program gaps and compliance risks on a periodic basis;
- A management framework and toolkit for centralized oversight of compliance activities firm-wide;
- Automated regulatory filings;
- Investor compliance monitoring;
- Portfolio monitoring and risk analysis;
- Support for chief compliance officers, including help preparing for regulatory exams and annual compliance reviews, as well as assistance from SEI’s legal, tax, and compliance experts;
- And regulatory event updates and a daily feed of regulatory news headlines from Thomson Reuters.
“For years, investment managers have dealt with regulatory compliance in a reactive and siloed way, focusing on one product type, regulator, or regulatory regime at a time,” says Jim Warren, head of solutions strategy and development for SEI’s IMS division, in a prepared statement. “But that approach is inefficient and error-prone, poses risks of non-compliance, and can hamper a firm’s ability to grow into new products and markets,” “SEI’s platform solves those problems by giving investment organizations an integrated, streamlined way to manage and execute compliance functions firm-wide.”
SEI currently partners with more than 300 traditional, alternative and sovereign wealth managers representing over $15 trillion in assets, including 32 of the top 100 managers worldwide, the firm says.
SEI has also partnered with key vendors such as post-trade systems and services vendor SmartStream Technologies. Last year, the companies said their collaboration is intended to yield a reconciliations utility that will help SEI better serve wealth management clients with cash, transactions and securities positions from a single reconciliation platform.
Earlier this year, SEI appointed financial technology vendor RiskFirst as a “key technology provider for its U.K. fiduciary management business,” according to a RiskFirst statement. The arrangement will see the two companies work together to combine RiskFirst’s pension technology expertise with SEI’s investment principle and capabilities, officials say.
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