Compliance Avenue

From time to time we have industry experts come on board to guest blog in order to provide our readers with interesting and insightful commentary.  Today’s article is by Tom Young of EXENET, a leading IT consultancy.

Recent amendments to Regulation S-P has brought greater attention to high-profile cases where organizations are accused of failing to provide adequate customer information protections as outlined in Rule 30(a).  For example: when an IT department fails to follow up on anti-virus problems or for leaving 5,000 customer records at the curb. Read the rest of this entry »

From time to time we have industry experts come on board to guest blog in order to provide our readers with interesting and insightful commentary.  Today’s article is by Larry Niland, LIMRA Senior Regulatory Consultant and former CCO of the John Hancock Financial Network and David Somers II, Esq., LIMRA’s Director of Regulatory Consulting and former IA Regulatory Officer and V.P. at Advest, Inc.

Best Practices and Regulation Roundtable Meeting

Over 261 million data records of U.S. residents have been exposed due to security breaches since January 2005, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. If you’ve talked to your firm’s Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) lately chances are he or she was not in a good mood. States are passing new regulations at a record pace on how client personal information and other critical data must be protected, controlled, transmitted, encrypted, transported, shredded; and when it is not, how to report the breach to everyone affected, including the regulators.

At a recent LIMRA roundtable meeting in Connecticut of broker-dealer and insurance company CPOs, participants discussed data privacy and security best practices and regulation. The following issues and topics are highlights from the meeting: Read the rest of this entry »

From time to time we have industry experts come on board to guest blog in order to provide our readers with interesting and insightful commentary.  Today we have Kevin Phillip and Wade Kenny of DMS Management discussing the implications of SEC audits to offshore fund managers.

It has long been a fact of life for registered investment advisers – preparing for, and surviving, the SEC examination. While, understandably, no organization looks forward to such an examination, its importance remains.  With proposed amendments from the SEC, it may become an even more frequent fact of life for the investment adviser.  Though few would argue that this is not in the best interest of investors, or the industry in general, the implications of these examinations raise some interesting questions for the offshore hedge fund and its service providers. Read the rest of this entry »