Due Diligence / RFIs

The increasing complexity and sophistication of electronic trading systems has created the need for more transparency and depth of counterparty operational understanding by investment managers. This understanding is necessary so investment managers and their broker dealers can better protect their organizations from operational and reputational risk that may arise due to inconsistent application of, or lack of best practices.

Unfortunately, most Investment Advisors are still sending questionnaires by email, creating an ad hoc process that leaves them exposed to liability and accomplishes little more than wasting everyone's time. Plia is transforming this process. We have solved some of the most pressing issues that Investment Advisors and Brokers face in this process:

Lack of standardization and best practices
- For advisors: Leverage standard questionnaires to ensure you're asking the right questions, consistently over time
- For brokers: Ensure that you're able to integrate an approval hierarchy into questionnaire responses, and reduce time to respond by re-using and customizing responses
Inability to manage processes within existing compliance workflows
- For advisors and brokers: Current approaches involve emailing documents and spreadsheets, and is prone to user error, version tracking problems, and things falling through the cracks. Instead, Plia allows you to setup a workflow with users at different levels and permissions, ensuring that approvals are received and tasks are completed before final release to a counterparty.
Lack of modern technology to allow for analytics, reporting and year-on-year comparisons
- For advisors and brokers: Leverage advanced natural-language processing technology for automated risk assessment, trends and analytics across responses and time, and increased efficiency in responding to, and analyzing responses to questionnaires.
- For advisors: Compare counterparty responses to the same question, and compare responses from the same counterparty over time. Assign grades to responses and compare grades across counterparties and from the same counterparty over time. Gain insight into counterparty progress.
- For brokers: Provide transparency into your workflow so that counterparties know progress is being made and do not send unnecessary status check emails. Compare responses over time to make sure you are making accurate representations to clients.
Little ability to audit processes and workflow
- For advisors and brokers: Stop using email to coordinate many different groups and counterparty communication streams, and organize everything into a platform with a full audit trail and ability to map an approval hierarchy and workflow.
Difficulty in interpreting results of RFI process and integrating into overall Best Execution and trading processes
- For advisors: Leverage Urvin.Compliance's professional services to help streamline the RFI process and better interpret RFI responses. Plia's Best Execution features provide all the needed functionality for organizing and managing a robust best execution process, including managing and distributing committee materials.