InvestorCOM helps wealth management dealers manage their investment shelf, prepare for audits and meet Know Your Product (KYP) regulations with ShelfMonitor™

TORONTO, Jan. 14, 2020 /CNW/ - InvestorCOM, a leader in financial services compliance solutions, today announced the release of "ShelfMonitor^TM for Dealers". This is a new product that will help investment dealers monitor their product shelf and stay current on the state of the products they provide to their investors.  ShelfMonitor is a subscription service that provides alerts to the subscriber when details of investment products such as mutual funds, segregated funds or Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) change.

This feature helps dealers:

• Be ready for regulatory audits;
• Keep their back-office systems current;
• Monitor the compliance of their investor's portfolios;
• Adhere to the regulations of client-focused reforms.

According to the president and CEO of a large Ontario-based MFDA dealer who piloted the software with InvestorCOM, they were eager to participate in the pilot. "In the ever-changing product landscape, keeping the product shelf data current and accurate for thousands of funds was challenging, especially as fund companies have stepped up the pace of change. With ShelfMonitor, the changes to the mutual fund product details come to us in a centralized, orderly and scheduled manner, and we can apply the updates to our shelf on a smooth, operational cycle.  Not only does this provide us with operational efficiencies, it keeps us audit ready and provides our advisor network with current information on the portfolio compliance of their investors.  And on top of that, our staff love it."

ShelfMonitor monitors over 100 data points for Canadian mutual fund products, in areas such as:

• basic information;
• management information;
• categories and classifications;
• sales and fee information;
• product suitability information;
• monthly performance.

"It's exception-based processing", says the manager of product operations and strategic initiatives for the same dealer. "With ShelfMonitor, we can set the materiality of changes we want to monitor, so we only deal with important product changes. Since this process is automated, we are now aware of more changes than ever before, and we can use the time savings to be more proactive in dealing with our advisor community. And we know they appreciate the early warning system this information makes available to us and to them."

David Reeve, CEO of InvestorCOM comments on the origins of ShelfMonitor. "With our history of providing compliance services to Canadian investment dealers, we saw a gap in the Know Your Product (KYP) process. At a customer event we hosted early in the year, compliance officers and executives were surprised to hear that during a five-week period in early 2019, there were over 2,000 changes to Canadian investment products each week. This means that you could easily get out-of-date with the status of investments on your shelf. ShelfMonitor is the first step in our Client-Focused Reforms (CFR) roadmap, to help investment dealers prepare for and meet the regulatory requirement to know the structure, features, risk, initial and ongoing costs of the investment products on their shelf."

About InvestorCOM Inc.

InvestorCOM (www.investorcom.com) provides financial technology and outsourcing services to banks, asset managers, insurance companies and investment dealers. The firm has developed an innovative suite of FinTech solutions in response to increasing regulation and the demand for more effective communication and disclosure from the financial services industry. InvestorCOM leverages digital technologies to bridge the gap between compliance needs and more efficient and cost-effective solutions for our clients' communication needs. InvestorCOM is your bridge to a digital tomorrow.

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SOURCE InvestorCOM Inc.

on InvestorCOM Inc., to interview David Reeve or to learn more about ShelfMonitor, please contact Dave Carr-Pries at InvestorCOM Inc., 416-527-0323 or [email protected]