C&A Consulting LLC (‘C&A’) provides operating management advisory engagements, with a focus on oversight and governance reviews in financial services.
Engagements have included assignments regarding Federal and major State-level cases, including serving as an operational oversight monitor.
C&A brings deep industry subject matter expertise in how businesses operate, direct line management experience, and business process and technology structural insight to oversight services. This gives us a very strong background in reviewing firms’ core policies and procedures, as well as process and platform deployment configurations.
C&A gives unique feedback to its sponsoring party (whether a regulator, or a firm seeking to better understand its operating vulnerabilities) on the management, risk and control hygiene of a firm.
C&A’s oversight advisory services enable sound, comprehensive corporate governance engagement in an effective and reform-oriented manner, including a review of:
• Corporate culture, governance and oversight structures
• Organizational accountability, transparency policy and guidelines
• Regulatory frameworks and best practices within line management teams
• Remediation projects and identification of weaknesses in the firm structure
• Management of roadmap plans and communications to track progress and goals
• Passive and active Pension, Asset Management and Investment Firms
• Alternative Investments, both Public Markets and Private markets (Private Equity, Real Estate, Venture Capital)
• Mortgage Lending, Operations and Service Administration, Processing
• Technology Services (Applications, Data Management and Governance, infrastructure)
• Capital Markets Trading across all major asset and liability classes
• Banking Operations
• Wealth Management/Brokerage & Registered Independent Advisory practices
• 3rd-party Administration Service Providers
Expert Guidance
As a qualified operational monitor, C&A Consulting’s expertise spans both operating consulting and oversight and governance services. In this hybrid capacity, our Oversight practice focuses on financial services assignments, delivering foresight and industry insight to assist your firm to ensure compliance with laws, regulation and potential enforcement actions.
We work closely with clients to anticipate major federal and state agency regulations, that often lead to satisfying those obligations to support oversight, governance and compliance requests. Our strong working relationships with regulatory authorities is a natural extension of our client work.
We have provided the management expertise needed to review and assess the effectiveness of a Three Lines of Defense (3LoD) Risk Management Model to determine its ability to identify and deter fraud and market abuse, and create a positive risk culture.
C&A consultants possess the business acumen and proven methodologies to anticipate such regulatory requirements.
Priorities
Our experience with top financial services regulatory agencies provides a unique advantage in how we approach each assignment. C&A practitioners have held senior executive roles directly supervising the regulatory responsibilities of our client firms, and expediting programs that enable firms to achieve superior governance, structure and organizational culture.
Our approach of such assignments enables a firm to more directly adopt modern business process management, automation and workflow process frameworks, combined with our expert knowledge of various practices and state of automation in the industry.
Ensure a firm’s leadership understands the causes/effects of previous failures leading to regulatory oversight and to take timely, corrective action to remediate such issues.
C&A has a strong practical sense of developing structural controls to deliver both effective compliance and risk & control processes, without sacrificing business operational effectiveness.
Assess effectiveness of client’s control environment and their ability to comply with rules & regulations they are subject to:
• Ascertain that sufficient remediation is properly undertaken at the appropriate depth & levels within the firm, and root causes of compliance lapses addressed.
• Enhance governance and decision-making to reinforce the proper balance between business goals & improved culture of respecting the regulatory environment.
• Building an oversight program and execution / implementation paths
• Ensuring structure of the risk & control processes are in accordance with Three Lines of Defense model
• Developing business monitoring, exception measurement/metrics capabilities, and compliance programs which identify and control non-compliant activity
• Improving firm’s oversight, controls culture and integrity, from a board-level risk management & compliance level, through the management team and firm structure
• Providing true independent oversight of best practices, to gain the level of control and self-oversight that businesses can sustain to manage risk
C&A helps establish a formal policy, process and operational execution framework to help firms detect & prevent non-compliance with their obligations, thus, ensure a solid path to remediation.
Our mission is to deploy effective programs that align with sustainable corporate reform.
• Anticipate/address clients’ regulatory requirements
• Understand sources of points of failure in how firms structure business practices and operational controls
• Renew corporate integrity and controls
C&A’s deep operations and technology experience, allow us to balance the corporate governance mandates with each firm’s ongoing operations.
Our clients choose C&A for their oversight and governance programs to help effect complex strategic remediation-driven transformation. Our experience, serving in various C-level proxy roles in core consulting assignments, places us in a unique situation of involvement with the re-structuring of business operations and improving internal controls and technology systems, to enable adoption and implementation of best practices.
We engage directly with federal, state and local government agencies, while we support both clients and their regulatory compliance requests to implement sustainable corporate financial reform.
Business Drivers
Greater regulation driven by Dodd-Frank financial reform since 2010 and related industry overhaul have heightened the need and awareness for corporate governance, transparency and accountability, and stricter reporting requirements for public and private organizations.
Far-reaching investigations into areas of industry business practice abuse that regulators have deemed damaging to customers (and other stakeholders) are on the rise. The financial regulatory agencies have identified and penalized entities that have not followed proper interpretations of formal rules and regulations — ranging from poor sales practices, conflicts of interest, and improper disclosure of practices to outright inaccurate processing of outcomes. Firms are under increased scrutiny to eliminate such practices and quickly pivot their organizations in complying with policies and procedures and adhering with the letter of their findings.
Greater corporate transparency and accountability across many agencies and their mandates are accelerating the adoption, and creation, of oversight programs as a functional discipline in today’s organization. Today’s successful modern growth enterprise must demonstrate effective management, operational structure and processes, and technology systems that enable transparency and accountability.
Business Outcomes
• Regulatory reviews & program support
• Three Lines of Defense Governance Model
• Leadership & corporate governance strategy
• Corporate Strategy, Operational solutions
• Reporting consulting services & project execution
• Program / Project management & support
• Compliance assessment, remediation & support
• Operating Infrastructure assessment; Operational process design
• Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Planning
• Business controls framework evaluation & review
• Information Security review
• Reporting consulting services & reviews
• Operations assessments; diagnosis of operational deficiencies
• Best Practices Recommendation – operating & structural reviews
• Reports & evaluations
• Operating Infrastructure assessment & operational process design
• Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Planning
• Financial technology systems selection & integration
• Vendor, Platform evaluation / selection
• Regulatory reviews & program support
• Compliance assessment, remediation & support
• Audit, Monitoring & Operational Compliance services
• Operational / Financial Risk Management
• Business Controls framework evaluation & review
• Information Security review
• Leadership / corporate governance strategy & tactical advisory services
• Financial oversight & program support
• Independent reviews / assessments for decision-making, resource deployment