Hilltop Advisors deep experience in the financial services industry has helped build its Regulatory Compliance practice. Add the fact that many of professionals are auditors (Big 4, Government, and former bank examiners), it strengthens our compliance audit capabilities. Specifically, our Regulatory Compliance team has helped clients with the following:
- identifying the regulatory requirements that apply to our client,
- determining whether our client’s existing compliance policies and/or procedures need changes (we often team with law firms who we recommend for regulatory compliance issues),
- designing, implementing and testing new policies and procedures,
- performing “pre-exam” or “mock” reviews to assess our client’s readiness as we always recommend that our clients identify items that the examiners will likely identify and begin working on remediation efforts before the regulatory exam starts,
- assisting Compliance or Internal Audit groups with the compliance testing, and
- assisting with selecting, implementing and testing technology applications used for compliance,
Our Regulatory Compliance team has helped clients with the following efforts:
- assist our client with Exam (or audit) Strategy which includes but is not limited to the following:
- planning on how the exam will be coordinated – Client’s internal lead, areas of likely focus, who the SMEs will be, who will be responsible for responding to the examiners, established meeting protocol, etc.,
- identifying possible/probably exam findings and creating responses that should be started in anticipation of results,
- managing response times,
- escalation process and protocols,
- exit meeting – who, what, how, when etc. answered,
- assisting our client with gathering information as requested by examiners,
- assisting with response drafts to exam questions,
- performing agreed upon remediation steps and implementing new controls to help ensure compliance going forward, and
- helping prepare final responses to examiner’s report.
Our Regulatory Compliance practice provides compliance assistance in the following areas:
- all bank compliance related to Bank Secrecy Act (BSA – privacy requirements),
- all bank compliance related to Anti-Money Laundering (AML requirements) controls/procedures,
- all bank compliance related to tracking foreign asset movement (OFAC),
- all Federal and State regulatory requirements for lenders (requirements to protect the borrower for all loan types including TRID, Fair Lending, RESPA, HMDA, GSE Seller/Servicer Requirements),
- all Federal and State regulatory requirements for and loan servicers and asset managers (including HAMP, HARP, HAFA, Fair Credit Reporting, Fair Debt Collection Practices, GSE and other investor Seller/Servicer Requirements),
- all Loan/asset securitization requirements (Regulatory AB) for disclosures, process, etc.,
- all servicing requirements to protect the Trust that holds the underlying assets (primary, special and master servicer requirements),
In addition, this team provides compliance and other services for the parties that have entered contracts as follows:
- Purchase and Sale contracts (assets, corporate entities, lines of business or products, etc.),
- Performance contracts,
- Loan covenants,
- Investor Seller/Servicer requirements,
- Loan securitization “trigger” event tracking and execution requirements,
- Loan sale repurchase requirements,
- Loan indemnification requirements,
- Purchase price calculations as required by purchase agreements.
- Any other transaction related agreements that require one or more parties to comply with terms and conditions therein.
Our iSolutions technology team has created a compliance audit tool that can be configured to test any of the regulatory requirements noted above and is often used by Hilltop’s compliance audit teams. The benefit of the Compliance Audit System (CAS) is that it standardizes the audit process, specific audit steps to be taken, provides “drop down” menu choices for findings and a free form text area to note any other issues that the auditor deems important to support our conclusion. The CAS tool can easily be updated when any changes in the regulations are released – the new/changed audit steps can be uploaded quickly and our teams can immediately begin testing to such new regulation. We have used the CAS tool for the OCC Consent Order work, litigation, on-going compliance reviews, State Attorney Generals’ settlement orders, etc.