“Building and growing with us, flexible to our needs, that it’s all-in-one is really exceptional. There’s really nothing else like this.” - Giovanni Corrado, CCO, Republic Capital
Ongoing compliance for SEC or FINRA regulated firms consists of a long list of reviews, filings, and routine monitoring across the firm. This is usually a significant time commitment and a demanding one for firms of all sizes. Ensuring your firm is compliant - and doing so in a time efficient way - is critical to meeting the company’s topline goals.
In this article, we break down how Republic, a fintech company that allows individuals to invest in startups, crypto companies, pre-IPO shares, and more, approached this problem and how Hadrius has been an instrumental part of the solution.
What is Republic and what brought them to Hadrius?
Republic is an investment platform that allows individuals to invest in almost anything, including startups, pre-IPO shares, real estate, and more. Since 2016, Republic has deployed over $2.6 billion in investments, supported over 2,000 ventures, and has a community of over 2.5M users across 150 countries.
They have separate divisions devoted to their different products: an SEC regulated RIA, Republic Capital, that handles institutional investments, as well as a FINRA regulated broker-dealer, Republic Retail. This resulted in a complex compliance program consisting of several legacy vendors, many manual processes, and dozens of tools to track. Not only did this present a significant challenge to their day-to-day management of their compliance routine, but it made regular examinations an intensely time-consuming process.
When Republic first came to Hadrius, their top priority was to streamline their established compliance program while avoiding any interruptions in ensuring their compliance obligations were met. They needed a solution that they knew was well-engineered, would create significant time-savings, would be flexible to their complex existing compliance requirements, and could be smoothly adopted by their various teams and departments.
How does Republic use Hadrius to run their compliance program?
When the team at Republic was looking for a compliance solution, they wanted a platform that was scalable, flexible, and reliable. A platform that could dramatically reduce the time they spent on their current compliance process.
Hadrius worked closely with Republic to replace their legacy employee compliance software covering attestations, trade monitoring, and disclosures, as well as working with the Republic marketing team to automate marketing review. This start allowed for significant efficiency gains with minimal interruption, and laid the groundwork for Hadrius and Republic to work closely together towards a wider implementation.
With Hadrius’s AI-powered marketing review module, what previously took several hours of marketing review each week across articles, social media, investment memos, website changes, and videos became minutes. Marketing employees could upload documents to Hadrius and receive line-by-line compliance insights and recommendations to tweak non-compliant text before submitting it to the compliance team for final review.
“All the back and forth with marketing, red-lining, etc Hadrius cut hours and hours on the entire process. It makes my life super easy.” - Giovanni Corrado, CCO, Republic Capital
Republic’s compliance program has dramatically advanced in the last few months. With 24/7 access to Hadrius’s compliance and product team, Republic’s compliance needs were rapidly reflected in the product, and within a few weeks they were able to replace their legacy employee compliance software and implement Hadrius across the firm. Shortly after, their remaining legacy vendors, including their electronic communications review and archiving software, were also replaced by Hadrius, and their employees across the organization were onboarded. Hadrius’s AI-powered communications review ensures far fewer false positives and catches violations that other software completely misses. The communication review module surfaces potential violations to the compliance team for their review, providing an AI-generated summary of the conversation with a note on the compliance violation, and handles archiving for channels from email to slack to social media from one interface.
“Hadrius cut the time we were spending on communications review by 75% at least.” - Giovanni Corrado, CCO, Republic Capital
Employees outside the compliance team also benefited: with 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.
From here, Hadrius began working closely with other product lines at Republic, and now handles their entire SEC and FINRA compliance software needs. Republic was able to achieve the smooth transition they desired, and did so rapidly in just a couple weeks. To this day, they receive 24/7 access to the Hadrius compliance team for continual support, product updates, questions, and feature requests.
What impact has this partnership had on Republic?
The Republic team raves about Hadrius and are continually surprised with how much more efficient their day-to-day routine has become. Across their compliance program, from communications review to marketing review, trade monitoring, archiving, and employee disclosures, they’ve seen upwards of 70% reductions in time spent on these tasks and checks. Admins on the compliance team have an all-in-one view of the entire organization, where they can handle all these processes from one dashboard.
“Our entire compliance routine is at least 3x as efficient” - Giovanni Corrado, CCO, Republic Capital
As they continue to scale, 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 evolving requirements.
Ready to take your firm’s compliance up a notch?
Dozens of firms like Republic 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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