Pub. 4 2014-2015 Issue 6

O V E R A C E N T U R Y : B U I L D I N G B E T T E R B A N K S - H E L P I N G C O L O R A D A N S R E A L I Z E D R E A M S May • June 2015 11 THE COMPLIANCE ALLIANCE LIFELINE T he passing of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 placed significant compliance costs at the feet of community banks. Thankfully, 22 state bankers associations anticipated this burden and worked together to come up with a solution to consolidate compliance costs across multiple banks in different states. Compliance Alliance was created in 2011 as a complete compliance resource for banks to aid their staff. The primary goal of Compliance Alliance is to provide quality compliance services and free up the bank’s compliance personnel to focus on bank- specific functions. A Product Unlike Any Other So how did Compliance Alliance become a national service in four years time? Shortly after the passage of the Dodd Frank Act, Scott Daugherty, president and general counsel of Compliance Alliance, met with 18 compliance officers to find out what kind of support they needed with new federal regulations in place and more on the way. “Then we went to our first state bankers asociation convention in 2011 with a staff of four and an idea, but really no product to offer,” Daugherty explains. “Even with just an idea in place, 35 to 40 banks at convention said they were ready to sign on; we chose 10 banks as sort of our guinea pigs.” Four years after its inception, Compliance Alliance is in 35 states and working with 22 state bankers associations. They’ve gone from four to 10 employees — four of whom are attorneys to answer any federal compliance question a user may have. That “dirty work” Daugherty references includes summarizing each new regulation in layman’s terms and creating templates for banks’ compliance procedures, which can take 40 to 60 hours of work for each document. Compliance Alliance has a KNOWLEDGE. CLARITY. RELIABILITY. www.compliancealliance.com (888) 353-3933 “Whether a bank’s compliance department is one person or 10, it’ll be a time saver to them,” Daugherty says. “We do the dirty work so they won’t have to recreate the wheel.”