Compliance is an operating line, not a department.
This is what we would actually do, in what order, and what it costs.
No discovery call is required to see the number.
What we would go looking for
These are patterns that recur in financial services, written as things to
look for. They are not findings from a named engagement.
Reconciliation breaks cleared manually every month by the same people, treated as business as usual rather than as a defect with a cost.
Onboarding and KYC rework — files returned for the same handful of causes, repeatedly.
Commission and override arrangements with distribution that were competitive when signed and were never revisited.
Complaint remediation cost accounted for as redress and never traced back to the process that generated it.
Critical outsourcing with performance measured on availability rather than on anything that affects the customer.
The sequence
Five weeks for one operating unit. More units run in parallel rather than in
series, so a group does not take five times as long.
Week 1
Intake and reconciliation5 requests written for financial services, alongside the 107 covering the operating spine. We tell you which findings the gaps will limit before any fieldwork starts.
Weeks 2–3
Full pass, not a sampleEvery account in scope is read rather than sampled.
Week 4
Quantification and challengeEach finding sized, and put to whoever owns it before it is written down.
Week 5
Report and walkthroughThe written report, ranked by annual value and by how hard each finding is to act on.
1 core request written for financial services, inside the full intake.
Anything you do not have can be skipped with a reason — skipping narrows what the
review can conclude, and we tell you where before the work starts rather than after.
Onboarding, KYC and AML operations — Volume, cycle time, rework rate.
If any of this is already happening
The review is always worth doing and rarely urgent. It becomes urgent when
something else is happening — and if one of these is, the sequence above compresses
to fit it.
An examination notice, or a deficiency letter from the last one
A fee-billing error found by a client rather than by you
Succession, or a purchase offer that values recurring revenue
A custodian transition, which exposes every reconciliation shortcut at once
Growth that outran the operations team two years ago
Who needs to be in the room
Signs it: Managing principal, CEO or CCO
Will resist it: Advisers whose book economics and service cost become visible — worth telling them what the
review is for before they hear it from somewhere else.
Has been asking for it: Operations and compliance, who have been carrying the exceptions
What it costs
Priced by operating unit — an entity, a location, or a business the accounts are
kept separately for. The second unit costs less than the first because by then the
intake is built, the chart of accounts is understood and the patterns are known.
Purchase order is the primary route — most
buyers this size raise a PO and pay against an invoice on terms. Card and bank
transfer exist for those who prefer them.