MirrorWeb, a U.K.-based tech firm, is looking to build a competitive presence among U.S. advisors through modern technology and artificial intelligence.
The firm, which was founded in 2012, has launched Mira, a supervision agent that reviews communications data for regulated financial services firms and can generate tailored supervision policies by analyzing an advisory firm’s compliance handbook against SEC and FINRA rules and enforcement decisions. The platform, built on MirrorWeb’s decade of native communications data from more than 1,000 regulated firms, uses contextual analysis to identify potential violations rather than relying on keyword-based flagging systems, according to the company.
“Instead of having to wade through hundreds of false positives and resort to sampling it to try and actually run your compliance program, our view is that the power of the agent, the power of AI is to apply your rulebook and your handbook directly to those messages without you having to run keywords or legacy lexicon systems and then review every single message against that standard,” said Jamie Hoyle, who heads up product at MirrorWeb.
Hoyle said compliance teams have often spent years creating sophisticated compliance guides for their firms, yet the technology to match has not been available. Too often, he said, legacy systems surface flags that turn out not to be valid compliance violations.
“It’s just a huge amount of noise, and what we’ve tried to do throughout the history of our organization, what we’re launching with Mira is something that eliminates the noise and surfaces real risk or things that are borderline and actually require the attention of a professional to review and remediate,” said Hoyle.
He said that early customers have seen up to an 80% reduction in time spent on communications review while identifying more issues that previously went unidentified.
Mira says its system can distinguish between routine expenses and potential policy violations by understanding context, such as recognizing that a Michelin-starred dinner exceeds a firm’s gift and entertainment policy cap, said Hoyle. Mira routes flagged communications to appropriate reviewers, applies escalation protocols and creates audit trails during the supervision process.
The platform monitors multiple channels, including email, iMessage, WhatsApp and LinkedIn for RIAs, broker/dealers and other regulated firms.
With Mira, MirrorWeb has attempted to shift the focus from alert- or message-centric review to individual rep monitoring, aggregating signals (IM, email, WhatsApp, Slack, outside business activities) into a single profile.
“One of the big shifts we’ve seen [in communications monitoring] is getting back to that idea of, let’s say you have 500 reps inside your organization, there are some who need a higher level of attention, and there are some who need less,” said Hoyle, noting that Mira was built to aggregate the signals for each of those users.
“So, these are Peter’s instant messages, his Gmail, his WhatsApp, Slack, and this is his outside business activity. We are bringing that into a single profile and are able to make more intelligent decisions,” he said, by looking at it in aggregate and analyzing it. “That is what Mira starts to unlock for firms.”
He pointed to additional capabilities on the immediate horizon but could not speak on the record about them prior to publication.
