The Problem
The Investment Advisers Act of 1940 gets new material layered onto it every year and effectively never gets revised. The SEC publishes annual examination priorities (a short list of areas examiners will focus on plus the broader 75-item baseline), ongoing enforcement actions against named firms, no-action letters, risk alerts, and rule amendments. FINRA publishes its own rule book and notices. The major securities law firms (the ones that get paid ten times more than anybody else and deal directly with the SEC on rulemaking) publish client alerts that frequently land before the SEC moves, because the lawyers were in the room.
None of this is consolidated. Most RIAs read whatever happens to arrive in someone''s inbox, miss the rest, and find out about the rule change reactively. Reactive can mean reading a peer''s enforcement action, getting flagged in an exam, or paying a consulting firm $15,000 to deliver the new manual language six months after the rule went live. A CCO recently built a simple weekly SEC + FINRA scanning agent in about thirty minutes that produces a monthly digest and was told by a consulting firm that the same thing would cost millions.
The firm with current regulatory intelligence reacts in days. The firm without it reacts in quarters.
Source Monitor
Internal SoftwareReads every primary and secondary regulatory source on a continuous cadence
What The Software Does
Reads SEC publications: rule amendments, risk alerts, no-action letters, annual examination priorities
Reads FINRA notices, rule changes, and regulatory bulletins
Monitors named securities-law-firm client alerts (the firms that frequently know first)
Captures recent enforcement actions against peer RIAs for pattern analysis
Applicability Classifier
AI AgentClassifies each item by topic and applicability to your specific business profile
What The AI Does
Tags each change by topic (marketing, custody, books and records, Reg S-P, advisory contracts)
Filters out items that do not apply to your business model (RIA-only versus hedge fund, retail versus institutional)
Scores material changes versus housekeeping
Surfaces a focused weekly digest instead of an unfiltered feed
Manual Impact Mapper
AI AgentMaps every relevant change to the specific manual section that needs updating and drafts redline language
What The AI Does
Walks your compliance manual section by section and identifies which sections each change affects
Drafts redline language for each affected section with the rule citation attached
Surfaces overlapping changes that touch multiple policies
Generates a monthly manual-update recommendation pack ready for review
CCO + Outside Counsel Monthly Review
Human ReviewCCO and outside counsel review proposed manual updates, approve, and schedule advisor training
Review Criteria
Expected Impact
Before:
CCO reads what arrives, hopes nothing critical was missed, and pays a consulting firm to flag the rest after it is already too late.
After:
Weekly digest of every relevant SEC, FINRA, and law-firm change with applicability flagged and manual-update recommendations attached to the specific policy section that needs to change.
Result:
100 percent visibility of in-scope SEC and FINRA changes within one business day of publication, with monthly manual-update recommendations replacing $10K to $20K of annual consulting fees