At InvestorCOM, our products play a key role in generating regulatory and compliance documents. So, it makes sense that our solutions should embrace and generate accessible documents for individuals with visual and cognitive disabilities. And we do.

Publishing
As part of our document accessibility strategy, Publisher was the first solution to generate documents that are accessible at source, and do not need remediation. Publisher is used by fund companies to generate regulatory documents filed with SEDAR, posted on their websites, and distributed to investors. This includes Fund Facts, ETF Facts, Management Reporting of Fund Performance (MRFP), Financial Statements (FS), Quarterly Portfolio Disclosures (QPD) and Prospectus documents. InvestorCOM’s Publisher system, when enabled, will automatically produce accessible documents (at source) that meet the AODA standards, and these documents can be confidently provided to regulators and investors as needed. We launched this feature on March 26, 2019. See the Press Release for more details.

Client Reporting
Our next Accessibility focus will be on making transactional documents in our customer communications management (E-CCM) suite of products, accessible. Transactional documents include personal and private documents such as investor Statements, Confirms and Tax Slip documents. Once composed and made accessible, these documents will be available to be loaded into customer content repositories. When downloaded by investors, they can be fed into screen readers and read back to the users. Various software that can read and verbalize accessible PDF documents include:

• Adobe Acrobat Professional which use features within the software to read accessible documents
• NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org/), which is shareware version of screen reader software, available to be downloaded with a donation
• Licensed Software – JAWS, a licensed screen reader from Freedom Scientific (https://www.freedomscientific.com/)

Our E-CCM clients look to us to help push e-adoption rates beyond 50% by removing friction from the acquisition process and creating engaging digital experiences for investors. For an optimal and compliant customer experience in the digital channel, accessibility cannot be an afterthought. Our E-CCM platform builds accessibility into these documents at the point of creation to ensure compliance and an optimal client experience.

Compliance
Many documents are sent to InvestorCOM for use with our products. These include documents for our Continuous Disclosure Management (CDM) compliance solution, our InvestorPOS pre-sale Fund Facts delivery, and our DOX Marketing Fulfillment platform. We will be supporting our clients to keep them compliant by offering remediation solutions for any non-accessible document sent to us for use with our products.

Summary
Our customers partner with us to provide them with products and solutions that help them effectively meet their regulatory obligations while supporting an excellent client experience.

Steve Castrucci

About Steve

Steve is the Director of Product Management at InvestorCOM. 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 and allow them to achieve their business goals.