Friday, March 30, 2018

iComply Investor Services Attracts Former NASDAQ, PwC and FINRA Executive

Vancouver, B.C. - iComply Investor Services Inc. (iComplyICO), a RegTech software company creating enterprise solutions that reduce the burden of financial, regulatory and compliance requirements, is announcing that Manny Alicandro has been appointed to its advisory council.

Alicandro boasts an impressive resume in compliance and financial services, including leadership of PwC’s Financial Services Risk and Regulatory Practice, General Counsel at MANA Partners, Former Assistant General Counsel and President of BOX Regulation, NASDAQ, and multiple compliance and regulatory leadership roles at FINRA.

Alicandro also worked closely on the development of the SEC's Consolidated Audit Trail or "CAT," one of the world's largest data repositories that is slated to contain a complete record of all equities, options, and securities traded in the U.S.

“Before the CAT, there was fragmentation in the available data about equities and options markets and no central repository of data, which opened the door to market manipulation. And even when an investigation was initiated, it took months to gather all of the data and link it together. CAT along with with its central repository and customer information solves this; it is planned to go live to broker dealers later this year,” said Alicandro.

“Manny’s experience with the CAT and legal-entity identifiers for the SEC fit perfectly into the architecture of our products,” said Matthew Unger, CEO and Founder of iComply, whose iComplyID product, which provides the investor with unique consent and transparency features that allow them to authorize and track who has accessed their personal information, was announced recently at Money 20/20 Asia in Singapore.

iComply takes compliance and privacy one step further by making it possible to separate legal-entity identity information and the compliance ledger, removing privacy vulnerabilities and adding transparency by enabling compliance procedures to occur at the protocol level. This means the technology can be used in a variety of applications including blockchains, central banking systems, and stock exchanges as an enterprise compliance solution.

Unger expects that many broker dealers in the US will face significant challenges and expenses to meet the requirements of implementing CAT. “Currently, the broker dealer network is expected to bear the majority of the costs of implementing and maintaining a live integration with CAT. This is a problem our blockchain compliance automation tools are uniquely well suited to solve and with Manny’s expertise these tools can be refined into turnkey software solutions.” said Unger.

The launch of the CAT was delayed for a year, with the exchanges citing digital security fears. In 2017, major hacks into Equifax and the SEC’s EDGAR system raised concerns over the safety and security of storing the personal identification information of every U.S. investor in the same database as every securities trade made in the U.S. capital markets.

“Separating the legal-entity information from a public ledger of trades is something the cryptographic markets have had more time to work on than the CAT project team has. It is important for privacy, security, and market stability that the individual maintain ownership and the right to know who is accessing their information. There is no reason why every single bank employee, or each ICO-issuing entrepreneur needs to have access to your SSN and other keys to your real world identity,” said Unger.

“I heard about iComply through the MIT network of Alumni and Angels, did my research, and it seemed like a great company creating a much-needed product to solve a genuine problem,” said Alicandro. “I strongly aligned with Matthew on the need for KYC, AML and other procedures for these offerings and treating them as securities. I can see ICOs disrupting the public markets; but in order for the ICO market to mature, it will need to emulate the public markets and offer true transparency, disclosures, updated financials and all of the other required components. Governance is fundamental, even if it is a form of self-governance.”

iComply’s software enables reporting on the sources of funds that come from a blockchain ledger in real time, supporting anti-money-laundering (AML) and anti-terrorist-financing (ATF) efforts of financial institutions and governments more securely and cost effectively. Since Bloomberg Law announced the release of the iComply Prefacto Protocol for the Ethereum blockchain, the company is the world’s first-to-market global regulatory automation service for blockchain securities.

About iComplyICO

iComply Investor Services Inc. (iComplyICO) is a regulatory technology company focused on digital identification, legal workflows and compliance automation for initial issuance and secondary trading of tokenized assets (security and utility). The technology also interacts beyond blockchain and can be used by traditional and decentralized companies alike. iComply currently has two major components: Prefacto Compliance and iComplyID.

Prefacto is the first solution to unlock compliant secondary trading for decentralized assets and is technology agnostic - meaning that new blockchains, mesh networks, or centralized trading systems can be integrated securely. iComplyID covers identity verification and investor privacy. An integrated ecosystem, the software streamlines legal and accounting processes and provides automated checks and balances which occur before a transaction is posted, enabling an efficient workflow between investors, regulators, securities issuers, and capital markets service providers.

Learn more: iComplyICO.com

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Company Name: IComplyICO
Contact Person: Brittany Whitmore
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Phone: 1.778.238.6096
Country: Uruguay
Website: http://www.icomplyico.com/