How to use RIA Express

Video Transcript

In this video, we will show you how to use our RIA Express Compliance Manual Drafter Tool. After you’ve made a purchase for an RIA Express Compliance Manual Drafter and signed an engagement agreement with us, you will be sent an email that will look something like this. And in that email, there will be a link to where you can start to fill out your compliance manual drafter.

You’ll click on the link, and you’ll be taken to a page in Contract Express. On the first page, you will see a set of instructions for how to submit, to review and submit the questionnaire. The next page will just be some general acknowledgments. You’ll need to agree to those above acknowledgments. “Save & Continue.” And whenever you are asked if you want to include our RIA Compliance Consultants Master Logs and Supplemental Compliance Forms to the manual click “Yes” and then “Save and Continue.”

Now, this is where the tailoring and the specifications for your firm come into place. So you’ll get questions like “What is the full name of the Investment Adviser firm?” For the sake of this demonstration, we’ll use RIA Compliance Consultants and an abbreviated name – again, up to your discretion – we’ll, for this purpose, use RCC and you’ll put in things like the home office address; phone number; if you have a website; what is the firm’s home state; how many reps are affiliated with the firm; in general questions such as those. And so with this tool, there are 25 pages of questions which you can see through this navigation box that I am scrolling up and down on and questions range from things on the firm information like we were just filling out; questions about owners and managers of the firm; code of ethics.

We’ll go ahead and go to that Code of Ethics page and you can navigate back and forth between pages. Just be sure, though, when you’re done with the page, once you’ve entered any information on that page to click “Save & Continue.” There is an automatic save feature built in, but again, just to be safe, why don’t you go ahead and click that save button so you don’t lose any time working on this and have to fill out any information again.

So then back to the Code of Ethics questionnaire. So “Will employees of RCC,” again, the name of the company for this demonstration, “Will they be required to annually, review and acknowledge the code of ethics?” If you say “Yes,” we’re going to kick out certain language for your compliance manual. “No,” we’re going to kick out other language for your compliance manual. So basically, you just go through this questionnaire. All of the pages of the sections, and then on this last page, page 25, you, again, have more questions to answer. You hit “Save & Close.”

And now what’s happened is Contract Express – in this manual drafter tool – they have generated documents that will be reflective of the information that you put into the system. So we were just filling out an SEC Manual Drafter. And so this is the document that we get. You download it into a Microsoft Word document. And then if you’re using a newer version of Word, click “Enable Editing.” And then, so here is the completed compliance manual. And it has all of the acknowledgments. And then actually down here is where the manual actually begins. And the date of the manual will be reflected by the date that you answer the questionnaire. And we have a Table of Contents, again, laying out all of the sections that we had, and so if you had – let’s say you didn’t have branch offices and you answer “No” to the branch office question in the questionnaire, this section right here would not show up under supervision, that branch office audits would not show up.

So then what you can do is you save a copy of this to your desktop or whatever, you know, maybe cloud service providers you are using. And then this is a manual. And then – but there are certain sections in the manual that will not have been addressed by the questionnaire. And so you will need to go through and review the completed manual, and so areas that have been highlighted and italicized in blue, those are areas where we couldn’t really develop a specific question to kind of get at the policy or procedure we were looking at. So, you know, “Are there other definitions that you feel like were not included but that you need to include?” And then if they’re not, you know, you can, you know, use the Word document, you just delete that section. So basically go through, and any time you see any text that’s in a different color, you’ll want to remove that text. You want at first to read what it says and then make a determination of what part of that is applicable to you; what part of it’s not. And then you can make the determination if you’re going to remove that section or not. So that is just a quick, brief overview of how the Compliance Manual Drafter Tool works, and if you have any questions about how that tool works, you can always call us at (877) 345-4034 extension 109. Thank you for watching.