Greenboard — "Rippling" for financial compliance & operations

Hi 👋, we’re Dave and Ed, cofounders of Greenboard.

TLDR;

Greenboard allows financial firms to consolidate financial compliance software onto a single, easy-to-use platform. Cost-savings and streamlined experience are often what drive customers to sign - but the real magic of Greenboard happens when we aggregate our customers’ relevant data onto a single platform that uses AI to detect risk faster and more reliably than previously possible.

If you’re a fintech or compliance leader get in touch at founders@greenboard.io.

The problem: financial compliance software is fragmented and bad. Maintaining compliance is hard.

In addition to paying for software, financial firms currently hire expensive consultants and large compliance teams to help maintain compliance, but this isn’t really working. Some recent examples:

• ~$300M in fines handed out to big banks for not archiving communications
• $100M lawsuit between a regulated firm and their consultants over an egregious compliance violation

Our solution: consolidated, human-centric software to drive a culture of compliance. AI to detect risk faster and more reliably than ever before.

Financial compliance teams today often pay for 2+ different software solutions for things like communications archiving, compliance program management, screening trades for conflicts of interest, tracking and approving marketing content, etc.

Greenboard changes this by bringing all core compliance functionality onto a single platform (starting with the compliance needs of RIAs). See greenboard.io for more info.

The dynamics of the space remind us of HR/IT software pre-Rippling in a few ways:

• A lot of fragmented functionality is needed on top of a core system of record. A lot of the needed functionality ultimately comes down to CRUD operations + collaborative tooling.
• Clear sets of power users exist (compliance teams for us, HR people at Rippling) but everyone in an organization needs a login
• Spend on software matters in non-revenue generating areas, and many organizations would love to consolidate vendors.

Humans, machines, and the future of financial compliance

A super reductive checklist on how to maintain financial compliance looks something like this:

1. Keep detailed records of dozens of things having to do with your business, employees, and customers
2. Examine these records and look for bad (non-compliant) things that might be happening
3. Address the bad things that you found and put processes in place to prevent these things from happening in the future

Currently, the technology adoption rate is high for 1) and low for 2) and 3).

It wasn’t always the case that financial firms could count on cheap hard drives and cloud computing to keep records. Not long ago when filing cabinets (and file rooms) were the norm recordkeeping required substantial resources. It turns out that computers are cheaper and better than humans at storing files by such a wide margin that there are no longer roles for file clerks in the economy.

Our thesis is that GPU-powered computational statistics will similarly transform step 2) above. Ultimately machines, not humans, will prove to be meaningfully better at examining records for potential compliance issues so compliance people can make determinations on compliance risk and mitigation.

Asks

If you’re a fintech or compliance leader we’d love to hear from you. You can reach us at founders@greenboard.io.