After an extensive investigation and feedback period, the CSA (Client Securities Administrators) recently released the published rule amendments to implement Client Focused Reforms (CFR) across Canada. CFR is a series of investor protection reforms based on the fundamental concept that clients’ interests come first for dealers in their interactions with investors. The reforms provide obligations to the dealers in four areas:

• Know Your Product (KYP)
• Know Your Customer (KYC)
• Suitability of Recommendations
• Disclosure of Conflicts of Interests

Over the years, many dealers have focused on their Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures and processes, while providing less emphasis on Know Your Product (KYP). With ShelfMonitor^TM for Dealers, InvestorCOM helps dealers tackle the need to KYP. ShelfMonitor^TM keeps their product shelf up-to-date while providing the ability to assess, approve and monitor the investment products on their shelf.

Introducing ShelfMonitor^TM

ShelfMonitor is dealer compliance software that monitors changes to investment products and provides alerts when they occur.  ShelfMonitor for Dealers is specifically configured for investment dealers that need to understand, assess, approve and monitor the mutual funds, segregated funds and ETFs that are available to their investors on their product shelf.

Key Features

The key features provided by ShelfMonitor make it easy to use and derive value:

• Alerts – investment products undergoing changes trigger alerts sent to a recipient list.
• Investment changes – the alerts are highlighted in a format that promotes research and investigation of the changes by the dealer.
• Back-office – the changes can be loaded into third-party software such as back-office systems.
• Filtered – the investment products can be filtered so that only the products on a dealer’s shelf are monitored. The product changes can also be filtered in other ways, such as by popular investments, investments with a high level of activity or by best-selling investments.
• The time-period – while most dealers monitor regular periods, ShelfMonitor is designed to monitor the changes between any beginning and ending date.
• Materiality – while there are over 100 attributes monitored by ShelfMonitor, configuration parameters can be setup to only monitor key attributes, or attributes with specific change characteristics.

Important Benefits

Summarized below are a few of the benefits of ShelfMonitor for Dealers:

• Assurances that your dealer firm is audit ready.
• Knowledge that you are making the correct investment decisions for your investors based on current information you have on your products.
• Reduction in effort to be compliant with regulations and keep your data up-to-date.
• Quicker actions and decisions after learning about investment product changes.
• Reduction in the risk of non-compliant portfolios developing after investment changes occur.
• Assurances to your advisors that their systems contain the most current investment attributes.

Flexibility is Key

Overall, flexibility and ease of use are important capabilities of ShelfMonitor for Dealers. Flexibility does not stop at ease of use: we offer ShelfMonitor to you as a 30-day, no cost trial. In a short time and with a minimal learning curve, dealer representatives can begin receiving regular alerts, configured and filtered for their special requirements.

Please email info@investorcom.com if you would like to learn more about how you can begin your own 30-day trial.

Steve Castrucci

About Steve

Steve is the Director of Product Management at InvestorCOM and he has been responsible for defining, building and bringing the ShelfMonitor product to market. Steve has been a product manager with financial services software firms for over 20 years, helping his customers by defining and delivering software products that improve their business efficiency, solve their challenges and allow them to achieve their business goals.

Tags: client focused reforms, compliance software, investor protection, kyc, kyp, regtech, shelfmonitor