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StarCompliance aims to create seamless, intuitive experiences for financial services employees to make compliance tasks simple. StarCompliance Product Manager Will Haggerty tells you how we make the magic happen
Compliance software loaded with the latest functionality is useless if employees can’t use it easily. That’s why, at StarCompliance, we aim to create seamless, intuitive experiences. When financial services employees use the STAR Platform, compliance tasks become simple and easy.
Our goal is to make end users independent: empowering employees to manage compliance tasks around their own schedules and primary jobs. Meanwhile, compliance teams see their workloads lighten as employees submit fewer support tickets. Following are five ways the STAR Platform accomplishes all this:
1. SENSIBLE FORMS
Sensible forms are a key feature of intuitive compliance software. We build out forms in the STAR Platform with simplicity and ease of use in mind. Features such as nested questions, descriptive section headers, hover-over text (useful for expanding acronyms), and clear text explanations allow employees to complete forms quickly and efficiently on their own without having to pause and ask compliance teams for help.
The STAR Platform also has a useful feature called user groups, which uses human resources data to automatically configure forms for certain users. For example, if an employee is outside the US, the platform can hide questions related to US political officials that don’t pertain to non-US.employees. This way, employees see only relevant questions.
2. SENSIBLE CERTIFICATIONS
Our platform makes certifications easier in two ways. One is by automatically collating reportable transactions. The typical certification process involves employees validating, updating, or manually reporting happenings from the previous quarter or year, and then attesting to the accuracy or validity of the reported activities.
Our software makes the attestation and certification process much more efficient by automatically capturing any reportable transactions from the previous quarter for review, saving employees from time-consuming manual entry.
Another way we make certifications easier for employees is by combining various certifications and attestations into one action. Compliance officers can combine transactions holdings, compliance attestations, political attestations, and more into one task. Employees save time and effort by going through the process just once rather than completing one certification, opening another, and repeating the process over and over.
3. AUTOMATED PRE-CLEARANCE
Star’s automated pre-clearance feature provides employees with the real-time feedback they need to make the right decisions when it comes to personal activities. This also helps protect the firm from undue risk.
The STAR Platform is so easily configurable that it approves most requests quickly and automatically with no need for manual review. And if it denies an activity for a reason defined by the rules engine—such as a request that surpasses the entertainment threshold, or requesting trade approval during a blackout period—the system can communicate that reason to the employee right on the screen.
Compliance officers can also easily configure which activities are routed to review. If an employee is getting close to the gifts and entertainment threshold, for example, the system can route the activity into the compliance team’s line of sight rather than granting automatic approval.
4. AUTOMATIC REMINDERS
Say an employee receives a notification to complete a compliance task while she’s in the middle of her own work. If she stops what she’s doing, she risks losing momentum and focus. If she ignores the notification, she risks forgetting about it by the time she finishes her current work.
That’s what makes the STAR Platform’s reminders feature so effective. It’s a simple tool, but it does a lot to improve the user experience. The STAR Platform will send automatic reminders after the initial notification until a task is complete. Employees are more likely to complete tasks on time when they can fit them conveniently into their own workflows. This feature is also entirely configurable: Compliance teams can determine the quantity and timing of all reminders based on what’s appropriate for their firms.
5. SINGLE-SCREEN NOTIFICATION
Finally, the STAR Platform interface is highly intuitive, with everything employees need to do or access organized clearly on an employee dashboard they see as soon as they log in. To take any compliance-related action right from the dashboard, they simply click the colored boxes on top to trigger a pop-up window where they can complete the task. Everything they need is right at their fingertips from the moment they log in.
All of these features make the STAR Platform intuitive, fast, and efficient. We’ve put a lot of time and thought into creating an experience that allows users to get regulatory compliance tasks out of the way quickly and accurately, freeing up more time to do the high-value work they were hired to do.
