Before taking advantage of OpsCheck, everything at ViewTrade Securities required a meeting. Whether in their offices in southern Florida or northern New Jersey, managers met with their teams to assign tasks. Teams met with each other before reporting back. Everyone used different spreadsheets to track their different tasks and meetings in different workflows. It wasn’t an efficient or effective way to run day-to-day operations.
Today, more than six years after first deploying OpsCheck in their business, the introducing brokerage firm is among the solution’s biggest proponents.
“Anybody in our business would benefit from OpsCheck,” said ViewTrade Securities Chief Compliance Officer and Chief AML Compliance Officer Mark Ford. “You can upload your entire written supervisory procedures, break them out on a daily basis to everyone in your organization, big or small, make a definite set of functionalities, including assignments to specific people, and have that just repeat over and over and over again.”
Ford and his colleagues use OpsCheck to assign daily tasks – both manually and automatically. The OpsCheck system makes clear who must perform a task, when it should be completed, and whether key personnel have completed it before they leave for the day. Supervisors can review work, spot check, and make sure everything will be satisfactory at the start of the next day.
The software has been especially helpful in compliance. At any broker-dealer, compliance is paramount. It requires human intervention and manual review. But it can be streamlined to complete tasks in a cascade that maximizes effectiveness and efficiency. Ford uses the solution to automate and track as much of the compliance process as possible.
ViewTrade has loaded all their compliance functions onto the daily scheduler on OpsCheck so they can be followed every day, never overlooked. ViewTrade also stores reports and other documents in OpsCheck, maintaining an archive for audits. Additionally, Ford and others have appreciated the ease of checking on the system from their phones and other devices. OpsCheck is extremely useful for remote work, for instance.
“OpsCheck ensures that tasks at hand are completed, recorded, reviewed by supervisors, and put to bed,” Ford said. “Then the employees can move on to the next assigned tasks. You have to make sure that your processes are in place and are followed every day – OpsCheck makes it a lot easier to do.”
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly for any companies considering OpsCheck, added Ford, setting the system up at ViewTrade was easy. “It was a very simple and painless process,” he said. “We’ve had to make very few changes over time. After you have the initial setup, it’s like clockwork.”