FINRA
, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, hopes upgrades in its compliance portal will leverage technology. FINRA recently held a virtual conference entitled “FINRA Gateway.” This conference was about the transition from FIRM Gateway to FINRA Gateway.
The virtual conference was moderated by Chip Jones, FINRA’s Senior Vice President for Member Relations and Education.
The speakers were: Jennifer Duran, the Director of Product Management, Technology for FINRA Enterprise Data Platforms, Noah Egorin, the Senior Director and Product Manager for FINRA Credentialing, Registration, Education and Disclosure (CRED) and Claudia Holanda, the Director of Product Management, Technologyfor FINRA Enterprise Data Platforms.
Firm Gateway is FINRA’s compliance portal and the site is getting an upgrade which FINRA hopes will be more efficient and user friendly.
On its website, FINRA noted this about the transform.
“Technology shouldn’t slow you down – it should make you more efficient. That’s why FINRA is launching the new FINRA Gateway.
“The new compliance portal, powered by FINRA’s Digital Experience Transformation, is designed to streamline the FINRA compliance and reporting experience by providing a more flexible solution that can be customized to target your specific needs.
“The new system, which will be implemented in stages, focuses on compliance functions, such as research, reporting and responding to requests, rather than on compliance systems. This will ultimately help you perform your compliance tasks more efficiently.”
Egorin noted that the new version will leverage modern technologies like artificial intelligence.
“FINRA’s has had a huge opportunity with the major technology investment to move to the cloud. We’ve developed expertise in user experience, machine learning, AI, natural language, and how do we expose back to the industry.” He said. “So, this opens up transitions from us going from sale information to real time data. This creates opportunities to do things on a much bigger scale, so instead of doing things a month at a time, can we do them years at a time?”
Duran explained how the new system would be more user friendly.
“What we looked at when we started thinking about the pain points we heard from firms were things like, ‘hey, I don’t want to go to three different places to figure out all the compliance tasks I might have to look at, whether that’s from a registration perspective, or a filing reminder, or an information request.’” She said, “So, what people will see in FINRA Gateway is we’ve looked streamlined that into a couple- you know into one place- so that people will see that very quickly.”
FINRA gateway is set to go live for the whole of FINRA in July, however the old Firm Gateway will also be available for users until early 2021, they said in the conference.
Since February 2020, Claudia Holanda noted, some firms were able to use FINRA Gateway in a pilot program.
She said based on firm feedback they have improved the system even more.
“We found for example that one of the challenges that users were having was in filtering, for example. The filtering feature for the dynamic reports were not very intuitive. So, it was making the transition for a user a little bit more difficult. So, ultimately, we made some changes and we launched in app with guided tools and tutorials, with step by step instructions.” Holanda said.
She noted further, “Today, in classic CRD, if you wanted to run a report, you would first, you would select the report, find a date range, submit a report request, you would have to wait for the report to generate, you would have to click on another link for the report to generate,” she said, “Now, if you’re in Gateway, it’s completely different. You would select the report, you would set the filter, such as year to date which has a range of months that could be included and you would run the report and you would see the results on the screen. You can also delete or add columns and change the sorting, group by another field, and save as your own customized report and of course, export it.”
FINRA is a self-regulatory organization; it was formed in 2007 when the regulatory arms of the NYSE and the NASD merged.
