Allworth Financial Consolidates Its Compliance Stack with Hadrius

Working around a fragmented stack

For most of his 21 years in compliance, Corey Gamble watched his tools multiply faster than they improved. As the Chief Compliance Officer at Allworth Financial, he had assembled the kind of patchwork of point solutions familiar to any growing RIA: Global Relay for email review and retention, Red Oak for advertising review, and a separate platform for code of ethics.

“None of these systems really connect with each other,” Gamble explains. “We started wondering, how do we know nothing’s falling through the cracks?”

Hadrius feels more organized. I don't have to log into four different websites.

Part of the strain came from growth. In just over five years, Allworth had expanded from three nearby offices to 43 nationwide, from 50 employees to 550.

The existing tools couldn’t keep pace. The advertising review platform’s AI overlay was “expensive and not very good,” according to Gamble. Email review had “become its own beast,” with false positives abounding. “You're not really getting a great review when two thirds of what you're looking at is junk,” he says.

The widest gap was employee trade monitoring. The old system couldn't connect directly to custodians, so employees had to self-report trades and upload statements across hundreds of accounts.

As a result, the team was committing the cardinal sin of compliance: building workarounds for their own software. “We compliance people are always the ones saying, ‘No, do it the right way,’” laments Gamble, “and yet we were finding ourselves constantly having to work around our own system.”

Better and faster work

When Gamble saw Hadrius, he was impressed with AI capabilities that were “miles ahead” of his incumbent tools. He called references and canvassed peers at conferences. “We didn't hear anybody have a single complaint, which is unheard-of for a piece of software.”

Gamble loved Hadrius’ ease of monitoring employee trades with direct connections to aggregators and custodians. “What really pushed us was the ease of somebody logging in and adding an account,” Gamble says. “It takes less than a minute. I did it myself.”

Beyond People Oversight, the platform’s breadth of capabilities offered a tantalizing opportunity to consolidate point solutions. “Sending advisors to different places to do different things was always a headache,” Gamble says.

“The fact that Hadrius is one-stop shopping is huge. It’s got all these modules which will help us do better work and faster work. How can you say no to that?”

Compliance ready to scale

Consolidating Allworth’s point solutions onto one platform, a project still in its early stages, is already yielding peace of mind. "It feels more organized," Gamble says of Hadrius’ trade monitoring. “I don't have to log into four different websites.”

As the firm continues to grow, Hadrius will help the compliance team manage a ballooning workload. “I wouldn’t be surprised if our advertising review submissions double in three years,” Gamble says of Marketing Review, soon to roll out. He is especially excited to onboard the Hadrius module Testing. "It just takes our manuals and lays out, 'Here's what you say you're doing, and here's the checklist to make sure it gets done.’ We need that.”

For a firm that’s preparing to potentially double in the next three years, one agentic compliance system is paving the way for smoother growth and fewer headaches.

“Hadrius is just better in every way than what we had," Gamble says. “And as far as we could tell, it was better than anything else we looked at.”