Attracting the best hires
SmartRIA is headquartered in Knoxville, Tenn., and is well-connected in the local software development community, enabling it to hire a great team of developers without extraordinary loss of time and budget.
The company’s CTO, Adrian Carr, is well known in the local development community. His strong personal brand contributes to the loyalty of engineers and attracts the best hires to the company.
“It’s always difficult to find the best people, have the people who are talented, have the right skill set, and who are a good fit for your company and its culture,” Bartine says. “For us, it’s just a matter of talking to lots of people and finding the ones who are the right fit.”
Bartine says the company tried to hire people who were already familiar with the industry, but, given its goals and focus, it’s sometimes difficult to get people with both the particular skill set and knowledge and understanding of the industry. So people usually come to understand the compliance industry as they get to know the company and its customers. But, on the customer-facing side, they have industry- and compliance-related trainings to go through.
Security on the compliance arena
Compliance with security protocols is very important for SmartRIA. As such, it has secure file storage that is shuttered to be controlled by the compliance team but available to the entire team. This allows access to the system for anyone who is storing documents for clients or storing internal documents for compliance purposes.
“It’s upload for anyone, read-only in some instances, and controlled by the compliance team so everything remains organized and secure,” Bartine says.
By pulling in custodial data feeds and making things as streamlined as possible for oversight of client accounts from a compliance perspective, SmartRIA makes it so clients are touching the data outside of their software safe zones as little as possible, which minimizes the amount of its potential misuse.
Prioritization practices