New York — November 5, 2019 — Urvin.Compliance, a newly-launched fintech to address the industry challenges related to governance, due-diligence and compliance, today announced that it has acquired the PLIA compliance platform from Trade Informatics. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Urvin.Compliance is led by industry veterans, David Lauer and Bill Stephenson. Lauer is a technologist and market structure expert who recently co-founded Urvin AI, and has spent much of his career working for asset managers consulting around best execution, currently serving on the board of directors of the NEO Stock Exchange and on FINRA’s Market Regulation Committee, having co-founded the Healthy Markets Association and advised IEX. Bill Stephenson, former Global Head of Trading at Franklin Templeton, is also the founder of the highly influential AIR Summit global buy-side event series which is focused on innovation in the investment process.

The cloud-based PLIA platform, which will be rebranded Urvin.Compliance, provides counterparty management for both buy- and sell-side users. Aiding in compliance with various regulatory rules, such as SEC Rule 2016(4)-7, MiFID II, and HK SFC Electronic Trading Rules, the platform streamlines requests and delivery of counter-party information onto a single electronic platform and provides the necessary tools to analyze and report on all counterparty information for compliance records, due diligence committees and regulatory audits. While existing clients will see no changes to the platform in the immediate future, Urvin.Compliance plans to build new functionality that will further enhance the offering.

“With the significant amount of due diligence, risk monitoring and oversight required as part of a modern best execution process, we believe the Urvin.Compliance platform can be enhanced to meet the current and future needs of industry participants,” said Stephenson. “Dave and I envision it becoming not just the standard for due diligence, but really a single-point of contact to deal with many different issues in the trading relationship.”

“We believe that Urvin.Compliance provides us a great start to build more standardization, transparency and functionality that will reduce operational and regulatory risks for users on both sides of the Street,” added Lauer. “We look forward to collaborating with both new and existing clients globally to help promote ‘next practices’ across trading functions and asset classes.”

Lauer and Stephenson have worked together over the past eighteen months to help investment managers devise new solutions to the due diligence process as it relates to order routing and trading best practices. Over that time, they have partnered with more than 25 heads of trading to understand the core challenges faced across multiple facets of their business.

Stephenson noted: “This robust solution, combined with our deep industry knowledge, independence and technology expertise, will allow Urvin.Compliance to provide great value, evaluating and validating trading practices from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective. We couldn’t be more excited to add the Urvin.Compliance platform to our solution set as we work with clients to help them not only meet their compliance requirements, but turn their trading processes and workflows into a differentiator and potential source of alpha.”

For more information on the Urvin.Compliance Platform, click here or schedule a demo.