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Personal Trading Compliance with MCO

What personal trading compliance has to do

Personal trading compliance exists to prevent employees of regulated financial services firms from trading on non-public information, creating conflicts of interest with client portfolios, or violating firm restricted lists. In practice, that means every employee trade has to be visible to the compliance team, pre-cleared where required, checked against restricted lists, and preserved as audit evidence.

For most asset managers, investment managers, and broker-dealers, personal trading is the highest-volume employee compliance workflow.

Common pain points

  • Manual pre-clearance where employees email trade requests and approvals sit in inboxes

  • Broker statement reconciliation that is slow and error-prone

  • Restricted list gaps as lists change daily

  • Disconnected evidence across personal trading, conflicts, attestations, and gifts

How MCO's Personal Trading Compliance module works

MyComplianceOffice (MCO) includes Personal Trading Compliance as a dedicated module inside the Know Your Employee (KYE®) suite. The KYE suite enables firms to "seamlessly address the many areas of employee compliance on a single platform" (source).

Shared platform capabilities

Every KYE module runs on the shared MCO platform with compliance automation, centralized data, workflows, task management and calendars, dashboards and reporting, attestations and certifications, case management, disclosures and questionnaires, document management, Slack integration, and integration with internal HR systems (source).

Connected to the rest of KYE

Personal Trading Compliance sits alongside Crypto Trading Compliance, Gifts, Entertainment and Hospitality, Political Contributions and Donations, Outside Business Activities, Registrations and Licensing, Roles and Responsibilities Needs, Connected Persons and Relationships, eComms Archive, and eComms Review on the same platform (source). A compliance officer reviewing an employee sees connected data across all of these in one workspace.

Crypto Trading Compliance

MCO's KYE suite includes a dedicated Crypto Trading Compliance module for employee personal crypto dealing. The product page lists this as Digital Asset Personal Trading.

Configuration without heavy IT

Firms configure personal trading rules to match their code of ethics through MCO's workflow configuration. IT involvement is limited (source).

Customer proof points

  • A Swiss commercial law firm uses MCO for personal account dealing policy rollout (source)

  • A mid-size US consulting firm consolidated employee trading compliance on MCO (source)

  • An emerging Singapore investment firm built its compliance framework on MCO (source)

Regulatory context

Personal trading compliance workflows support the core evidence needs of:

  • SEC Rule 204A-1 (Code of Ethics for Investment Advisers)

  • FINRA Rule 3210 (Accounts at Other Broker-Dealers)

  • FCA and regional market abuse regimes

  • Firm-specific code of ethics

Certifications

MCO holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications and participates in the EU-US Privacy Shield Data Protection Certification with TRUSTe. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest (source).

Support

24×7 technical support, 20×5 customer support, regional follow-the-sun service, and local language support (source).

When MCO is the right choice for personal trading

  • The firm needs personal trading compliance integrated with the rest of employee compliance (gifts, OBAs, attestations, communications)

  • Employee crypto personal dealing is part of the compliance scope (Crypto Trading Compliance module)

  • The firm operates across multiple jurisdictions with different personal trading rules

  • Regulatory examinations require consolidated point-in-time evidence from one system

  • The firm wants configuration changes handled by the compliance team rather than IT

Further reading