“Hadrius is a FINRA compliance program we could rely on as a broker-dealer to scale with us.” - Ashley Rodabaugh, President & CCO, Frec Securities / Frec Advisers
Holding a broker-dealer license is one of the most powerful tools your firm has and provides a great deal of freedom in the experience you can offer your clients. With this freedom, however, comes significant compliance requirements to ensure regulatory good-standing, and for a firm seeking to grow and innovate, running a comprehensive but efficient compliance program is paramount to your success.
In this article, we break down how Frec - a fintech startup that allows individuals to set up direct indexing for a fraction of the cost as legacy platforms - approached this problem and how Hadrius has been an instrumental part of the solution.
What is Frec and what brought them to Hadrius?
Frec is an investment platform that provides direct indexing technology to individual investors, allowing them to save on ETF fees and access tax loss harvesting to save a significant amount on taxes, as well as providing other financial services like money market fund investing and a portfolio line of credit. They have raised $26m+ in funding to date.
When Frec first came to Hadrius, their top priority was to develop a compliance program they could rely on as a newly launched broker-dealer and RIA. They needed a solution that could be flexible to their needs as an innovative firm, scale with them as a rapidly growing startup, and be reliable as their key FINRA and SEC compliance provider.
How does Frec use Hadrius to run their broker-dealer compliance program?
Frec initially approached Hadrius after working with a few of the existing legacy compliance providers, especially on the marketing and communications review, and found they were inflexible, lacking key features they needed, and expensive. As a recently registered RIA and broker-dealer and with plans to grow rapidly, they needed a platform that could meet their needs and grow with them.
Frec began working with Hadrius to replace their legacy employee compliance software covering attestations, trade monitoring, and disclosures. Scalability was paramount: Hadrius allows employees outside the compliance team to create their own separate Hadrius log in, they can submit OBA requests, connect their brokerage accounts for live trade monitoring, complete attestations from the compliance team, and more. The admins on the compliance team were able to focus on orchestrating the compliance program, while the software would handle onboarding and reminding employees to keep up to date, making it easy for them to integrate into the compliance program.
“Legacy software providers were not very flexible, Hadrius is very flexible and moves fast with us.” - Ashley Rodabaugh, President & CCO, Frec Securities / Frec Advisers
Throughout this process, Hadrius worked closely with Frec over Slack, providing 24/7 access to the Hadrius compliance and product team to ensure a smooth onboarding and answer any questions.
From this close connection, Frec shared that social media review and archiving was important to them, and Hadrius, after a conversation to understand the details of their needs, developed and launched new features to support the review and archiving of the channels they needed to implement their marketing strategy.
What impact has this partnership had on Frec?
Hadrius has been a game-changer for Frec’s compliance program. Employee compliance has been able to run on near-autopilot now that the compliance team can manage it all from a single dashboard and seamlessly notify employees of tasks to complete, and employees are able to set up their brokerage accounts to run on their own. On the social media review side, what was often a task taking hours of effort has been cut in half, allowing the team to focus on higher priorities and maintain a rapid marketing cadence, driving their growth.
“Social media review is the biggest difference. Hours and hours saved, at least 50% less time on this because of Hadrius.” - Ashley Rodabaugh, President & CCO, Frec Securities / Frec Advisers
Frec is focused on continuing to rapidly grow, while Hadrius is providing an all-in-one platform that will continue to cover their SEC and FINRA compliance needs at any size, growing with them while remaining flexible to their changing needs.
Ready to take your firm’s compliance up a notch?
Dozens of firms like Frec have streamlined their compliance program across their organization and rely on Hadrius to make it possible. Hadrius provides the only all-in-one SEC compliance solution, and scales with your firm with AI-powered automations and 24/7 access to our compliance and product team. Request a demo here, or reach out to thomas@hadrius.com if you have any questions!
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