If you lead compliance at a growing RIA, you know the feeling: The calendar flips to audit season and everything else grinds to a halt. Manual processes suddenly feel fragile. Documents are hidden in multiple folders. Tools don’t talk to each other. And at the end of the day, you’re left stitching it all together under an enormous amount of pressure.
Here’s the truth: Staying compliant doesn’t have to be that stressful and can be done without a large in-house staff.
The following playbook identifies pain points and lays out better ways forward for lean compliance teams. It’s built on five core principles that define modern, operationally efficient compliance systems.
Ditch The Manual Paper Trail
The pain: In many small- to mid-sized firms, most compliance tasks, including attestations, approvals and testing, are still tracked manually. One spreadsheet gets updated, another gets emailed around, and no one on the team is quite sure what’s final.
The better way: Automate recurring workflows, such as employee attestations, marketing reviews, and exception tracking. Smart tools today enable you to assign, track and archive everything, with audit trails built in. This eliminates the age-old issue of version control.
Consolidate The System Sprawl
The pain: You’re managing personal trading in one app, vendor reviews in another and policy documents in a shared drive. The result? Gaps, duplicated effort and missed updates.
The better way: Use a platform that integrates these and other workflows into a single, unified environment. You shouldn’t have to re-enter employee data multiple times or search for the latest PDF document. Unified dashboards reduce error rates and keep everyone aligned.
Build For The Exam Before It Happens
The pain: When an exam or internal audit is announced, you first panic, then scramble. Reports aren’t ready. Communications weren’t archived. And other deficiencies come to light. You then spend days just preparing.
The better way: Modern compliance platforms let you operate like every day is audit day. Every approval is logged. Every change is timestamped. Every marketing asset is searchable. A good system turns audit prep into a click, not a fire drill.
Modern compliance platforms let you operate like every day is audit day.
Stop Playing Guesswork With Regulations
The pain: In a heavily regulated industry like wealth management, the rules are constantly evolving, as are exam priorities. New SEC marketing rule? ESG disclosure standards? Many firms play catch-up, updating policies only after risks surface or, worse, after an exam.
The better way: Adopt systems that map actions to policies and regulations in real-time. Smart platforms alert you to conflicts, changes or incomplete implementations, so you can act before the risk escalates.
Own Your Data (And Your Time)
The pain: Some legacy systems lock you in. Your data is hard to extract. Reports are rigid. And migrating tools can feel like a six-month nightmare.
The better way: Choose tools with open APIs, exportable records and modular design. That means you’re in control, not stuck with what a vendor decides you need.
Built For The Work, Not Just The Reports
Compliance doesn’t happen in reports. It occurs in the day-to-day processes within the systems your team logs into, the approvals you track and the gaps you address before they become financial and reputational liabilities.
Compliance doesn’t happen in reports. It occurs in the day-to-day processes.
Today, there are platforms built specifically for that reality. Ones that don’t require a team of engineers or a massive budget.
The best platforms are those built by experienced compliance practitioners who understand that the real pain isn’t regulatory complexity, but the operational overhead that most firms unnecessarily live with.
Sid Yenamandra is Founder and CEO of Surge Ventures, the parent company of RegVerse, Kovair, Security Snapshot and MGL Consulting, which have been unified to create SurgeONE.ai.
