NorthStar Systems International, Inc., the leading provider of wealth management software for financial services institutions, today launched the NorthStar Compliance Solution, the industry’s first integrated investment policy compliance platform that spans all types of investment products and client relationships. By employing the NorthStar Compliance Solution, wealth managers and their firms can reduce regulatory risk and increase financial advisor and compliance manager productivity by automatically building compliance into their workflows.

Since the emergence of new investment vehicles like separately-managed accounts, all types of financial institutions – banks, broker-dealers, and trust companies – are experiencing a three- to five-fold increase in the number of accounts they need to manage. Yet, most traditional compliance systems maintain compliance only at the account level. As the number of accounts increases, compliance managers and financial advisors are increasingly burdened with compliance administration.

At the same time, wealth managers face much more stringent regulatory requirements. In response, the NorthStar Compliance Solution offers a new type of solution – an integrated, firm-wide compliance platform that spans all investment vehicles. This Solution gives firms an early warning system for proactively detecting both internal and external compliance issues. In addition, NorthStar’s centralized client-profiling feature helps wealth managers preserve clients by avoiding mishandled investment guidelines.

Benefits to Wealth Managers

The NorthStar Compliance Solution streamlines compliance by standardizing and automating the process. Wealth managers will be able to:

•Reduce risk  By automating the investment policy process across all investment products, firms will be able to proactively detect both internal and external compliance issues before regulatory agencies.

•Improve productivity  By capturing a client’s investment constraints and suitability once and automatically leveraging them across all workflows, the Compliance Solution can reduce compliance administrative duties up to two-thirds, freeing financial advisors to spend more time with prospects and clients.

•Gain competitive advantage  By tracking changes to client’s investment priorities, firms can introduce new, more suitable products to clients’ portfolios as well as offer more personalized and timely services.

“To remain competitive in today’s marketplace, firms need to establish a more controllable, compliant environment that proactively mitigates a firm’s risk and frees advisory teams to service new and existing clients,” said Juergen Dittgen, NorthStar senior vice president, product management and field services. “The NorthStar Compliance Solution improves advisor productivity by reducing administrative tasks by as much as two-thirds, resulting in more valuable ‘face’ time with clients.”

The NorthStar Compliance Solution is “noteworthy in that the NorthStar platform contains a lot of the compliance systems’ functionalities already integrated within a wealth management platform,” reports Celent in its Automated Wealth Management Compliance Solutions, 2007.

For example, one NorthStar client, a trust company, adopted the NorthStar Compliance Solution because its trust system could not provide conformity to compliance regulations and client views for trust and non-trust products. Likewise, two national banks wanted to build compliance into an automated system, so they turned to NorthStar for a compliance solution.

A broker-dealer, who is not required to maintain an investment policy statement, used the NorthStar Compliance Solution to develop an investment charter as a client roadmap to improve client profiling and gain a competitive advantage.