As regulatory bodies around the world step up enforcement of investment suitability regulations to ensure firms and advisors are properly managing investor wealth, NICE Actimize, a NICE (Nasdaq: NICE) business and the leader in Autonomous Financial Crime Management, has enhanced its Sales Practices & Suitability solution with new flexible client review models and investigative tools that enable firms to align compliance programs with changing business models to better serve customer needs, while also driving down costs by automating investment suitability compliance processes. 

Using the NICE Actimize Sales Practice & Suitability solution’s new flexible client review capabilities, firms can easily manage client risk across a household, while meeting business needs and suitability obligations. Clients benefit from optimized portfolio performance and better breakpoint discounts; and firms benefit by being able to align compliance with changing business models so they can manage risk more effectively and better serve customer needs. 

“While assessing client risk holistically at the household level is an increasingly popular method for managing wealth, it’s not without challenges,” said Chris Wooten, Executive Vice President, NICE. “Today, most compliance operations struggle to see the complete picture of a client’s holdings because their legacy technology cannot link, aggregate and analyze accounts at the household level. Firms also have to rely on analysts to manually pull and correlate data from different systems, which is costly, cumbersome, error-prone and risky. Or they resort to expensive in-house solutions which fall short of the mark. The newest enhancements to NICE Actimize’s Sales Practices & Suitability solution address these challenges.” 

Using the NICE Actimize Sales Practices & Suitability solution, FSOs first determine the ‘house holding’ structure that best meets their business needs, and then maps those structures to the client review model. The Sales Practices & Suitability solution then automatically finds connected accounts and compiles accurate investment profiles for households in seconds. Analytics are run at the household level and alerts are generated when risk thresholds are breached. 

NICE Actimize ActOne Automates Investigations

Additionally, with the native integration of Sales Practices & Suitability used in combination with NICE Actimize’s ActOne case management platform, investigation time can be reduced by up to 70 percent. ActOne applies automation and intelligence to the compliance investigation process. Robotics automate repetitive, manual investigative tasks, while policy-driven workflows guide analysts through each action they need to take. Analysts can also use ActOne to collaborate with team-members, escalate cases, upload documents and notes, and share detailed findings, resulting in significantly streamlined investigations. 

ActOne provides a unified platform and focal point for compliance personnel to manage a wide range of alerts and cases related to regulatory compliance issues and financial crimes. For example, an analyst can automatically correlate sales practices analytics and related communications to verify that investor protection guidelines around risk disclosure were met.

“As wealth management firms change their business models to adapt to new customer demands, compliance is playing catch up,” added Wooten. “NICE Actimize’s latest enhancements make this transition easier. Firms can reduce the cost of compliance through automation, eliminate burdensome manual processes, meet their obligations to regulators, and better manage client risk on a more holistic level to encourage lifelong customer relationships, all while building a robust bullet-proof suitability compliance program.”