Automating Employee Personal Trading Surveillance

Currently many compliance departments are under a- Firm's portfolio trades.
lot of pressure to gather together the information- Holdings and trades attestation data.
required to meet the basic requirements of SEC rulesPERSONAL TRADING COMPLIANCE RULES
204A-1 and 17j-1. Keeping track of pre clearanceAbility to set up rules which can be run against this
requests, restricted lists, employee accounts,employee personal trading data and which can be
employee trading activity and employee holdingsapplied to different subsets of individuals within the
takes up so much of many compliance departmentsInvestment adviser firm is extremely important. Any
time that having time to analyze this data is acompliance management system needs to be able to
challenge for many. The following diagram outlines thecover the following rule types at a minimum.
different types of data that the typical compliance1. Security rules:
department needs to pull together in order to- Restricted lists
manage their employee personal trading compliance- Watch lists
requirements.- Blackout periods
Besides the difficulty of gathering all of the above- Approved lists
data compliance departments have to deal with the- Transaction rules (Di Minimis rules, short sells)
resistance of staff to the adoption of these2. Security type rules
processes, and the difficulty of analyzing- Approved security type rules
spreadsheet, paper and email based data.- Restricted security type rules.
Automation of the personal trading compliance3. Pre clearance checks
process can save firms a lot of time as well as- Validation that pre clearance requests were made
providing them with the ability to more easily analyzefor an employee trade.
the data and check for trends in the data. Any4. Employee Trade activity checks
automated personal trading solution needs to- Excessive trading
incorporate the following elements.- Holding periods
- Incorporate all main Personal trading data points5. Checks against firms trade data
needed.- Front Running
- Flexible rules engine- Tailgating
- Flexible reporting.PERSONAL TRADING COMPLIANCE REPORTING
- Ease of use to facilitate easy adoption byAny automated personal trading solution needs to
employees.allow the users to easily retrieve the data they
- Streamlined processing to save employees time.require and should allow easy filtering and sorting of
- Integration with overall compliance programthe data so that it can be extracted exactly as the
PERSONAL TRADING COMPLIANCE DATAuser requires for trend analysis. Adoption and buy-in
The main data required to meet the minimumby employees of any compliance system is
requirements are:extremely important therefore any system will need
Trade pre-clearanceto be easy to use and intuitive. Centralization of all
- Pre-Clearance requests.compliance tasks for employees also causes less
- Automated broker feeds of trading activity andconfusion and only requires employees to learn how
holdings.to use one system.
- Employee account data.