Challenge
Monitoring drift and compliance across a growing advisory book
In the nearly three decades since its inception, Spire has established an ironclad reputation for supporting today's top, independent financial advisors. However, as the company's advisory book continued to expand, overseeing client accounts to monitor drift and compliance became a massive undertaking.
To ensure advisors follow SEC regulations, support their clients’ investment goals and risk tolerance, and act as fiduciaries, Spire requires real-time visibility into all investment and trading activities. Historically, Chief Compliance Officer Sal Malik and the supervisors working under him relied on manual portfolio checks to surface this information. While this painstaking process — which required checking portfolios against market data in Yahoo Finance and Morningstar — worked initially, it showed limitations at scale.
Because portfolio reviews took up to an hour per client, it wasn’t always feasible for Sal’s team to catch and instantly act on every time-sensitive issue. Client success wasn’t the only consideration. With scale comes more rigorous SEC scrutiny. And with audit season on the horizon, Sal would need to provide even more granular visibility into account activity, as well as evidence of enhanced compliance controls, including share class monitoring.
Rather than attempt to solve this issue through increased headcount, Sal sought a unified operating system for wealth management. His ideal solution would empower Spire's advisors, protect its clients, and put time-intensive compliance monitoring on autopilot.
After nearly settling for an imperfect option, Sal was recommended StratiFi by a colleague. It only took a 30-minute demo to give Sal all the conviction needed to move forward with the partnership.
“We’d practically given up trying to find a solution with the compliance and wealth management capabilities needed to truly safeguard our clients. StratiFi was the only one to deliver on every front.”
Solution
Streamlining wealth management and SEC audit workflows with StratiFi
StratiFi provided the wealth management and compliance infrastructure Spire needed to seamlessly oversee its growing client network and navigate mounting SEC audits.
On day one, the StratiFi team sat down with Sal to level set on Spire’s risk definitions and specific compliance goals. With this shared vision, they worked together to update Spire’s risk questionnaires, customizing them to its client base while laying the groundwork for transparent account supervision.
“Whether they were completing a complex integration or jumping on a call to talk about an audit requirement, the team was incredibly attentive throughout onboarding,” Sal says. “They worked around the clock to get us up and running.”
With StratiFi, Sal’s team now has an AI-powered compliance dashboard for tracking all account activities, including trading, concentration breaches, and suitability issues. Even better, StratiFi automatically notifies supervisors of any drift so they can alert advisors to quickly troubleshoot. Having these insights at their fingertips saves supervisors hours of manual work and better equips advisors to meet their fiduciary obligations — even as markets rapidly change.
StratiFi also makes it exponentially easier to prepare for SEC exams. The platform automatically generates compliance reports and regulatory filings that Sal can use to answer examiners’ probing questions about how he’s protecting his clients. Plus, the StratiFi team went above and beyond to build Spire a share class monitoring system from scratch.
But the benefits extend well beyond Sal’s team. Some of Spire’s wealth advisors have also been using StratiFi’s proposal generation engine to win new clients. Once advisors upload their clients’ account details, StratiFi leverages AI-powered analysis to compare current holdings against alternatives. Advisors then use StratiFi’s customizable templates to convert this research into compelling, branded proposals in a matter of minutes. Now, they handily flex their investing expertise to high-net-worth prospects without losing time to manual research and proposal creation.
For an established, yet fast-growing firm like Spire, StratiFi’s all-in-one wealth management platform was the ultimate unlock.
“StratiFi isn’t just a win for our compliance team. Our advisors use its proposal building function every day and have had tremendous success driving client acquisition.”
Results
Scalable compliance monitoring, effortless risk alignment, and a foundation for future growth
With StratiFi, Spire transformed compliance monitoring, proposal creation, and risk alignment from a manual burden to a competitive advantage. Today, Sal’s team has a scalable wealth management system to support their expanding advisory book and ensure SEC compliance at every step.
- 15K accounts and $5B in assets managed through StratiFi
- 30% revenue growth across one wealth management group
Looking ahead, Sal is excited to double down on his use of StratiFi. Between its turnkey wealth management solutions and attentive support team, he knows he’s found a partner that Spire can grow with for the long haul.
“Our partnership with StratiFi is just great. I love working with their people and see us growing together for a long time.”
