San Francisco-based Hearsay Systems announced on Wednesday that Iain Duke-Richardet has joined the firm as compliance strategy principal.
Duke-Richardet joins Hearsay from Accenture, where he was the leader in the firm’s regulatory and compliance practice. He has also served in roles at RBC Capital Markets, Lehman Brothers, Barclays Capital and Goldman Sachs. While he has a legal background, much of his career experience has been with financial services firms.
In his new role, Duke-Richardet will help guide Hearsay’s clients around the quickly shifting regulatory landscape and coordinate with the company’s product teams to ensure that Hearsay’s solutions remain relevant and up-to-date.
“I’ll really be working with our production tech group to infuse compliance into the way our products and offerings are used and made available,” he said. “As a former user of Hearsay’s platform, and a former person managing users on the platform, I’m looking forward to bringing the user’s perspective to how we develop changes that will be made available for compliance teams and supervisors.”
Hearsay will also benefit from Duke-Richardet’s experience as an original member of Finra’s social media taskforce, which produced industry input for Finra’s initial guidance on how financial firms should use social media.
He mentioned that compliant digital communications are extra important in a world still struggling to contain an outbreak of coronavirus – but advisors are poorly prepared to handle social media’s compliance issues, especially as a host of new regulations, including the SEC’s Regulation Best Interest (Reg BI) near their effective date.
“Reg BI brings up two risk-critical things, one is the perspective of having a full and complete view of your customer or end client,” he said. “We’re going to have to think about that in the context of social media, and not just one form of social media, but multiple channels, is the advisor doing enough to put the full picture of the client together? Can they see that on a client’s social media, their client had some sort of circumstance? The second is full and complete disclosure around any recommendation. Communications via social media, whether direct messaging or posts, require all sorts of disclosure around any potential conflicts of interest that an advisor might have.”
Duke-Richardet also warned that advisors need to be prepared for more exams concerning business continuity planning and technology from regulators like Finra.