Meet The Latest Compliance Expert To Join StarCompliance: Steve Brown
Steve Brown, Star’s new Managing Director and Head of Business Development, arrives with a wealth of industry knowledge born of more than 25 years of experience in the field of financial compliance
At StarCompliance, we’re committed to leveraging the strongest, most qualified industry expertise to guide our business into the future. That commitment led us to hire Steve Brown as our Managing Director and Head of Business Development. Steve’s impressive career trajectory in compliance has taken him through some of the world’s biggest banks and financial organizations. We asked him a few questions to learn more about the most important lessons he’s learned in his career, how he’ll apply that wealth of knowledge to his work at Star, and what he’s most excited to accomplish with us:
Q: What compliance-related positions have you held in the past? How did these put you on a path to Star?
A: I began my capital-markets compliance career at an organization that was growing exponentially through acquisitions as well as organically. There, I was given an opportunity to build the organization’s compliance control room and investment banking compliance programs from scratch. At the time, the firm relied on manual processes and had no third-party service providers to help manage the workflow or data. The firm tasked me with designing and creating an internal compliance technology team, control room, and employee trading solutions. After leaving in-house compliance positions, I moved to PwC to advise financial institution clients. I had the opportunity to develop and/or assess close to 20 clients on compliance control room matters. During this period of my career, I became aware of Star and built a respect for the company, its employees, and its ethos.
Q: What challenges do you see in the marketplace today, and why do you think Star is best positioned to help with those?
A: Compliance teams are always challenged to do more with less. Sadly, some firms are taking a “juniorization” approach to meet budget requirements by eliminating more experienced and expensive compliance personnel. This is a risky regulatory bet, as firms may lose institutional knowledge by eliminating seasoned professionals. One approach to offset this risk is working with a regtech partner that intimately understands firms’ businesses, markets, and risks. At Star, we offer well-defined workflow and data solutions to enable firms to manage day-to-day employee and enterprise compliance conflict processes. These solutions have proven very effective for complex organizations.
Q: What are the top things you’re most excited to accomplish at Star? How will these accomplishments improve experiences for Star’s customers?
A: Because I’m very passionate about the control room ecosystem, I’m really looking forward to working with our clients to solve their control room compliance challenges by bringing creative, radical solutions to manage risk and compliance. My experience before Star includes designing and developing a control room compliance solution that consisted of employee trade and pre-clearance capabilities, conflict mitigation tools, and watch and restricted list tools, as well as a complete surveillance reporting solution for use across employee, firm, and customer trading activity. I built this all while balancing my day job of managing a growing control room that was trying to keep up with the firm’s growth. The lessons I took away were the need to balance demands while recognizing and prioritizing risks. I intend to leverage this experience to assist Star clients who are perhaps experiencing similar challenges. I’m also very excited to work with our product development teams as we build next-generation employee and enterprise conflict solutions and compliance platforms to support the office of the CCO. Star aims to be the compliance software provider to the office of the CCO. I’m here to help with that.
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