On 15 April 2015, Cordium, a leading global compliance consulting, accounting, tax and software provider to the financial services industry, introduced a new compliance software solution called Pilot.
A cloud-based solution, Pilot is a more up-to-date, cutting edge version of Cordium’s flagship product, ComplianceTrak. Pilot is designed to help compliance teams manage a plethora of compliance and operational tasks from start to finish and can best be thought of as a tracking and monitoring tool. Whilst many hedge fund managers have compliance manuals and processes in place, until now many struggled to document and monitor those processes, to prioritise activities and adapt best practices. Pilot now offers that capability.
“It all centres around calendaring. Pilot allows firms to set up multiple calendars and build out their day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month compliance programme to document, evidence and report on everything from a daily compliance monitoring perspective,” explains Jordan Schwartz (pictured), Director of Global Software Solutions at Cordium.
The skeleton that Cordium has built within Pilot for calendaring, permissioning, reporting, etc, goes beyond merely compliance. Operations teams and tax and accounting teams can likewise set up separate calendars and permissions’ workflows, making Pilot an effective solution across different business units of a hedge fund.
One of the most important aspects of Pilot is that it incorporates a vast array of intellectual property that Cordium has written over the years.
“We’ve built suggested task libraries into the system for a range of global regulations spanning SEC, FINRA, FCA, CFTC, HKSFC that clients can refer to and use within Pilot to build out their workflows.
“For smaller managers who don’t have dedicated compliance teams, Pilot not only gives them the infrastructure to monitor everything, it also provides a repository of knowledge on global regulation,” says Schwartz.
Pilot has been designed to help with the global compliance burden managers face today. Even firms with substantial infrastructure can still struggle to fully understand and document what they need to be doing in respect to regulation and compliance.
“What Pilot does is centralise the compliance programme and gives global compliance teams the ability to operate from one system for their reporting and documentation.
“When we launched Pilot we thought that the task library feature would be something that more of the small and mid-sized managers, who have fewer resources, would want to use. Surprisingly, we’ve seen just as much interest from larger managers. Although they typically have large compliance teams, having access to regulatory knowledge that they know is constantly being updated, has proven to be useful to them as well,” confirms Schwartz.
Using calendaring, Pilot will, for example, send out a reminder email to the compliance officer for when the next Form PF filing is due. That particular workflow, pertaining to Form PF, can be documented and tracked.
One of the other key features of Pilot is that it contains powerful search function capabilities. When clients upload documents, notes and comments, this makes it incredibly easy to find specific data and, when necessary, evidence a clear audit trail.
“If you want to do a search and pull out all of the Form PF data over the past two or three years, you can easily use filters within Pilot to bring up that data.
“We like to think of Pilot as being a Manager’s compliance filing cabinet,” concludes Schwartz
