[Governance Series] Revolutionizing Compliance for Small Firms With Paranj Patel

Paranj Patel is the Founder and CEO of ClearLines Group, LLC, a boutique regulatory and compliance advisory firm that helps broker-dealers, registered investment advisers, and fintech firms navigate complex regulatory environments. He brings more than 20 years of experience in financial services, including senior operational and compliance leadership roles at Prudential. Paranj previously served as Chief Compliance Officer for both a FINRA-registered broker-dealer and an SEC-registered investment adviser, where he led regulatory oversight, examinations, and compliance strategy. Today, he focuses on helping firms strengthen compliance programs, reduce regulatory risk, and align compliance with business growth.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:12] Paranj Patel discusses how ClearLines Group, LLC supports smaller broker-dealers through smoother compliance experiences

• [3:58] Three core principles for business growth and customer success

• [8:07] Viewing compliance as a business enabler instead of a restriction

• [11:29] The role of forms in compliance, customer experience, and data governance

• [15:01] Paranj talks about AI governance, data lineage, and real-time verification strategies

• [20:48] Using AI to monitor advisor behavior instead of keyword-based surveillance

• [27:34] Reducing compliance costs for small firms with AI-powered oversight

• [31:11] How to replace retrospective compliance reviews with real-time monitoring
  

In this episode…

Financial firms face growing pressure to balance regulatory compliance with customer experience, operational efficiency, and emerging AI risks. Many firms still rely on outdated forms, manual reviews, and reactive compliance processes that create friction for customers and increase business costs. How can firms modernize compliance while improving trust, reducing risk, and enabling growth?

Paranj Patel, a compliance and regulatory leadership expert with more than 20 years in financial services, explains how firms can rethink compliance as a business enabler instead of a barrier. He shares why companies should simplify customer onboarding, remove unnecessary form fields, and focus on verified data at the point of collection to improve both compliance and customer experience. Paranj also discusses the future of AI-driven compliance, including real-time behavioral monitoring, automated oversight, fraud prevention, and AI governance frameworks that help firms minimize costs while strengthening regulatory controls.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Paranj Patel, Founder and CEO of ClearLines Group, LLC, about using AI and smarter compliance strategies to improve customer experience and reduce regulatory risk. Paranj discusses data lineage and governance, preventing fraud in digital onboarding and e-signatures, and using real-time AI oversight to replace outdated compliance review processes.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik!

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn

• Paranj Patel on LinkedIn

• ClearLines Group, LLC

• "Why Pressure Is a Privilege With Andy Schwartz" on The Customer Wins

• "Building Brand and Culture for Customer Success With Liz Fritz" on The Customer Wins

• "[Emerging Tech] Protecting Businesses From Privacy Lawsuits With Richart Ruddie" on The Customer Wins

• Brian Hyman on LinkedIn

• High Meadow Solutions

Quotable Moments:

• “Compliance is how we build your business that is complementing the regulatory requirement while you grow.”

• “Customer ease of doing business should be the primary focus, right?”

• “If you have a problem filling out a form in the first place, I have already taken it down a notch.”

• “Why do I have to find out about a problem six months from now?”

• “If anybody claims that they got where they are without a mentor, they’re lying to you.”

  
  

Action Steps:

1. Simplify customer onboarding forms: Removing unnecessary questions and outdated requirements reduces friction, improves the customer experience, and helps firms collect cleaner, more accurate data.

2. Treat compliance as a business enabler: Viewing compliance as part of business strategy helps firms balance growth with regulatory obligations while avoiding unnecessary operational barriers.

3. Verify customer data at the point of entry: Real-time validation and identity checks help prevent fraud early while reducing downstream compliance reviews, delays, and remediation costs.

4. Use AI to monitor behaviors instead of keywords: Behavioral analysis helps firms identify risks more effectively than traditional keyword systems and enables more proactive oversight.

5. Implement real-time compliance monitoring: Continuous monitoring allows organizations to identify compliance gaps immediately, reducing financial exposure and improving operational decision-making.

   
   

Sponsor for this episode...

This is brought to you by Quik!

At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.

Using our FormXtract API, you can submit your completed forms and get clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate.

Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.

Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.

Go to www.quickforms.com to learn more, or contact us with questions at support@quikforms.com.

Powered by Rise25 Podcast Production Company

Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.

Richard Walker: 00:16

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Andy Schwartz of OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners, Liz Fritz of F2 Strategy, and Richart Ruddie of Captain Compliance. Today is a special episode of my series on governance, risk, and regulatory. And today's guest is Paranj Patel, the founder of ClearLines Group. Today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing.

When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time. Manually reviewing the forms instead. Get Quik!. Using Quik!, you'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started.

Now, before I fully introduce today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Brian Hyman of High Meadow Solution. Brian's team specializes in digital transformation and is actually Quik!'s new strategic partner in Salesforce development. Go check out their website at highmeadowsolutions.com. All right. I'm really excited to talk to Patel today.

And I'm just going to say this up front. Sometimes you meet somebody, you're like, oh my gosh, we hit it off so well, I really, really like this guy. So I'm excited to have this conversation. Paranj Patel has spent more than 20 years in financial services, including 17 years at Prudential, where he led across broker, dealer, and investment advisor business functions before advancing into senior compliance leadership and ultimately serving as chief compliance officer. Paranj is the founder and CEO of ClearLines Group and the founder of CLG Compliance Leadership Group, an AI native virtual chief compliance officer platform built for broker-dealers and investment advisors.

Welcome to The Customer Wins.

Paranj Patel: 02:12

Thank you very much. Thank you very much for a warm introduction and for inviting me to the show. It's an honor and a privilege to be on. And, you know, in today's environment, when I left my firm, I saw a gap. I saw a gap in the industry where there are many small to medium broker-dealers that are out there.

They're priced out of the technology, priced out of the enterprise level, compliance leadership guidance. Those are the smaller broker-dealers, hundred reps or more, or just about 50 to 100 reps. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to supply that industry with enterprise-level compliance leadership. and that is the main objective of the ClearLines Group's establishment from me. Behind the scenes, we are also working on some of the technology that would potentially help change the compliance industry as a whole, but that is down the line.

But today's objective for the firm is how can we provide a very solid foundation for a lot of the smaller broker dealers in the environment that we live in today. And that is a topic I really want to discuss with you today, and especially when we are considering the end client. So.

Richard Walker: 03:31

So hold on real quickly. This is why I wanted to talk to you like you are ready to go. And I want the audience to know that if you haven't heard my podcast, this is what it's all about. Talking to leaders like Paranj who just want to help their customers win and talk about how you're building, delivering amazing customer experience. I mean, come on, we're talking about compliance and regulation.

How fun is that? So let's dive deeper. Like fundamentally, what is it you're doing to help people?

Paranj Patel: 03:58

So let's put it this way. If we look at this industry, the financial industry, it's not about money. It's never been about money. Money happens to be the core center of it all. But it's about trust.

Yeah. Especially in the retail space. Right. In a retail space, any broker dealer, any investment advisor, anyone who's talking to a potential prospect, they're earning their trust. And that's where everything starts.

Right. And with AI coming into this space and where we have less and less human interaction, how is that customer experience going to be? Well, one could argue that AI is going to make the customer experience amazing, which it does, right? For example, Quik!. That's exactly what you do, right?

Your company makes customer interaction with the business much smoother, right? And yeah, if you take that's as simple as it sounds, but there's a lot more to it, right? That is exactly where someone I'll give you a good example. If I'm walking to a business and if the door that I'm about to open is locked, but the left door is open, there's a good chance I might not go in because it's frustrating. Face resistant right off the bat.

Right. Right off the bat those are very small things, but those things turn people off. Those things make the customer go away because they immediately lose faith in you. They lost confidence in you. Right?

So your company who's making this process smoother is allowing this customer to smoothly open the door and walk right in. Right. So let's take a step back for a little bit. I always fundamentally believe there are three key elements to a successful business. Number one, we have to take care of customer ease of doing business should be the primary focus, right?

Number two, if you do that right, it automatically serves your brand. Your brand recognition becomes better because now that customer is happy and able to conduct business with you, much smoother than the guy next to you, right? And if you do the brand right, then you're serving your shareholders, right? When you take all that together and you put your compliance hat on, when you're designing the control, when you're designing the forms, when you're designing the protocol, as long as you keep those three principles in mind, I think you have a very winnable formula for successful business and more importantly, growth, right? So that is where I am at right now to help the firm kind of see that, because a lot of times the firms will lose sight of that because, one, they are worried about regulatory issues.

They're worried about technology. They're worried about the costs of the technology, right? But if this comes back to basic, if they come back to just basic and start building from bottom up, start building from front to back, and then consider all those elements surrounding the customer is when you win, you know, back in the days, about five, ten years ago, everybody talked about, oh, we want Amazon experience. Well define Amazon experience to me. You want Amazon experience.

But looking at your process is so clunky.

Richard Walker: 07:17

Now I'm going to use an example. We had a customer who was going through the transition of best interest being added into the compliance terminology. Right? The Dol said all these things have to be in place. And so their complaint to us was, hey, our forms volume is skyrocketing and our costs are going up.

I'm like, yeah, a huge number of your forms are now centered around this best interest thing. It's your form. I can't control that. That's regulatory, I said, but there's something else happening that you're not paying attention to. You are getting higher and higher adoption levels in your company with this process, because it's so much easier.

You're winning. You're actually making more money as a result of this. Even though the regulatory pressure was you had to do this thing. They were so focused on the regulatory system. Yeah, they weren't really paying attention to the bigger picture.

And when that came out, look, they're not complaining anymore.

Paranj Patel: 08:07

And that's what's so funny. You said that, right? And this is what I have experienced before. I asked a simple question to a lot of people in the business. I said, what do you do, what does compliance mean to you?

Right. And I, when I asked that question, 99.9% of the time, the response comes back, oh, we have to make sure we follow the law. Well, that's inherent within compliance. But for me, compliance is not following the law. Compliance is how do we build your business that is complementing the regulatory requirement while you grow, right?

How do you marry them together in a way that you are not suffocating their growth. But at the same time, you're not breaking any regulations. So don't start with, oh my God, we are. We are restricted by these rules. Start with what are you actually building?

How are your customers going to interact with you? How are your customers going to feel about filling out 50 pages of form where you could possibly do ten, because you haven't done enough due diligence on how this regulation works? What are the exemptions? Which exemptions can you rely on? What are the control environments you can build ahead of time to actually take advantage of that exemption and apply.

Whatever is left of that regulation is to your business model, right? So we have to take a look at the business model first and then regulation. So we can tailor the approach of the regulation to that business model. And a lot of times what folks do they jump from the regulation straight into, oh, we got to be compliant. We have to kind of take a step back and look from the business side into compliance rather than the compliance side into business.

Richard Walker: 09:54

It seems to me what you're describing is treating compliance as only a constraint. Hey, money is a constraint. Time is a constraint. Technology is a constraint. It's just one of the factors that constrains how you build what you're going to build.

Is that a fair way to look at it?

Paranj Patel: 10:09

That's a very fair way to look at it. Actually, that's very fair because again, when you talk about finance, you're managing the finances. You're not crying about, okay, I don't have enough money, so I cannot launch this product. Well, you're going to figure it out, right? You're going to go raise the capital, you're going to do this, you're going to do X.

Same thing with compliance. Just because your Dol rule is saying, hey, these are ten things you have to do. It doesn't mean that you have a ten page form. There are mechanisms by which you can have your cake and eat it too, right? Find that balance.

To me, compliance is a balance. How do you balance? Because if you're overregulating yourself, then you're not growing. If you're underestimating yourself, then you're putting yourself in jeopardy! But if you have, if you strike the right balance, you can have your cake and eat it too.

So to your point, yes, treat compliance as just like any other constraint that you have, whether it's people constraint, financial constraint, or any other constraint.

Richard Walker: 11:04

I don't normally do this in my show. This is actually one of the very first in this series on governance. So I'm going to ask a selfish question, a self-interested question on my part. How does compliance view a form? It is a form of risk.

Is it something to regulate? Is it just to have to do it? How do you, especially you, were the chief compliance officer at Prudential, right? How did you look at the form? What did it mean?

Paranj Patel: 11:29

So there are multiple components to this right. I think this is a very, very great question. I actually really like this question. So the first side of it and this is the first that I always cover. There are minimal requirements that Finra requires, and at least in the broker dealer industry, let's just put it that way.

Of course, in any given industry, there are minimum requirements to collect X number of data. Those minimum requirements have to be covered right. So there is no getting away from there. Right. But then there's a little bit more, right.

So for example, you have a best interest rule that we just kind of talked about, right? It has so many levers to pull that it has to be within the form. So that is all that's part of that regulatory requirement, right? But the flip side of that is your KYC, knowing your customer. How do you pull in that information to your customer from a suitability perspective?

So let's just take a look at it for a second. A lot of the firms that I work with ask a lot of questions. They were not part of the regulatory requirement. So I asked the question, why are we asking this question? And the answer came back, oh, we had an issue a few years back and we got in trouble.

So someone told us that we had to ask this question, right? There are so many forms out there. You will see and you will find that outdated question. There is no merit in that no purpose of being there. Right.

So that is the clunkiness of the form that we are talking about. Right? So that's got to get out. And the last piece on the form is, and this is a very, very important piece that is your client record, right? How are you using that information?

Are you using all the information? Are you using some of the information? Right. Because depending on what information you collect, your risk varies because then again, now you're taking on customer's PII, right? What are your obligations?

Do you need those PII? Do you not need those PII? Can you live without those PII? Right. So I think the customer intake form is the first step where you are not only interacting with the customer, not only giving them the experience of what they're.

Going to experience moving forward because if I have a problem filling out a form in the first place, I already. I already have taken it down a notch now because I don't know what the rest of the service is going to look like, right? And two, once you have that information coming in, how is that data structured? How is that data protected? How is that utilized?

How is that data retained? What is your destruction schedule? Whole nine yards. Right. So custom form collection has a regulatory element and the firm's needs element.

And then most importantly, when you take a look at the whole picture holistically, that becomes your responsibility. All that data you have collected on that. So you have to be very meticulous about what data you're collecting, what data you're not collecting, and anything that is you're collecting, how it is managed, used and handled and stored on your side of the firm, basically.

Richard Walker: 14:28

So here's one of the reasons I'm bringing this up, because I don't think anybody's talking about this. Everybody in compliance and operations is talking about after the fact, after you collected the data. Is this correct? Did we find the errors? We're doing surveillance. Is it the right trade?

Is it the right license? It's all verified after the fact. And I'm looking at it saying, wait a minute. Where's the original source of truth? It's the form that is the original source of truth.

Why aren't we doing more to protect that part and enable that part further and further? And so that's my goal. And go ahead.

Paranj Patel: 15:01

No, no. And you. Sorry. Didn't mean to cut you off, but you hit the nail on the head right now as I'm developing. And I'm just going to get into a little bit of a sidetrack.

Not really a sidetrack, but it's connected. I'm developing AI governance, right? For a lot of different things that I'm working on. And one of the key elements in AI governance that I realized is data lineages, right? You have to prove to your data lineage that it is the right source and it's accurate because once it gets into the AI, there's a lot that could go wrong if your data lineage is wrong.

And that's, I think, where your tool comes into play, right? If you have a verification process right off the bat, right off the bat, you have a built -in verification process. For example, I put in my name and everything on the first page before you hit submit, can you run soft AML? Can you run soft CIP? Can you flag them immediately before it's hit submit?

That's exactly what you're talking about. Because instead of submitting bad information and having a failure of the KYC or AML flag or CIP flag two days later in the back office, that person reaches out to the customer and that takes another five days. Your firm can solve that by doing a soft KYC before even a customer submits the form, right? Yeah. And what that does is two things, right?

One, it improves customer experience, right? And two, now that collected data lineage is solid. Now if the firm decides to take all the client data and fit it into AI or whatever the purpose they're using it for, you have a pretty robust governance now because when you're auditing that or when the regulator requires the audit report on that LM model on that data being used by the LM model, you can prove the data lineage. And a data lineage has been verified right off the get go.

Richard Walker: 17:06

I love this.

Paranj Patel: 17:07

And I think that is where the value of your firm is. If you really think about that.

Richard Walker: 17:13

We're aiming one step ahead of that actually. How do you know the person who fills out the form is the person you wanted to fill out the form with? So for example, we're working with DocuSign. DocuSign has centered on clear identity management. You see them in airports, but clear is way bigger than that.

Their behind the scenes on LinkedIn to verify identity. So imagine being able to verify somebody's identity as they're filling out the form. Did you actually fill this out for Project benefit or did somebody impersonate you?

Paranj Patel: 17:42

It's actually a bigger problem today in the industry. Actually, the DocuSign and e-signature fraud is on Finra's radar, right? There have been documented instances across the industry because of how simple it is to commit fraud on DocuSign. You can sit there and create 50 fake email addresses, and you can use all those fake email addresses to open the account or open a contract or open a policy, and yourself can sign off on it through all those 50 emails right now. Does the industry have a bigger problem from the control perspective on the back end?

I bet you do. They do. They do because DocuSign is not a member regulated firm, so they don't own allegiance to anything. And hence Finra is very much focused on 2026, because I published my article yesterday on Finra priority. And one of the items that's being focused on is vendor oversight.

So regulators don't care whether DocuSign provides you the tools or not to monitor this, you are responsible for making sure you have what you need from DocuSign. So whether you're checking the IP addresses, is it coming from the same IP address? Is there a blackout list? Those tools are ones not yet available. Who doesn't have it?

They're building it. Right. So to your point, how do you know the person who's signing the DocuSign or person who's feeding the data is the correct person, whether it's online or whether it's in person? Of course it's in person. You can put manual controls around the identification, verification, things like that.

But when nobody's doing much of the business online anymore, everything is virtual. So I think your firm is in a primary position. You're the first line of defense. Literally. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. You're the first line of defense. Maybe two-factor authentication. Maybe in a place I don't know.

But there has to be a better way to verify this customer because right now the industry is dealing with post opening the account because now they're looking at hundreds and thousands of applications. Okay. Which one is fraudulently open? How do you figure that out? If you can stop that ahead of time at the inception of it, that's where there's a value in the market for that.

Richard Walker: 20:00

I hate to reveal that I have a way, but I can't tell you what it is yet. That's okay.

Paranj Patel: 20:05

It's in the end. I'll sign it and then you can show it to me.

Richard Walker: 20:10

I know, but this is what we think about. We think there's not enough focus on the front end where compliance matters and can catch the upstream problem and save the downstream process, and we can play a strong role in that. And I don't know that people think that way enough, and I think they should. The other thing you brought up, though, is governance. And I want to talk a little bit more about that in the world of AI because you're building.

We introduced the CLG, AI native compliance, right? Right. So I want to hear about that. But what I also want to hear about is if AI is involved, how do you get the AI to only do what you want it to do? How do you govern the AI itself?

Paranj Patel: 20:48

So AI governance is a very, very broad topic, right? Because if you look at it from a regulatory standpoint, we can talk about this for the next two hours, right? But to answer your simple question, the way I see AI governance from an executive perspective, from a business leader perspective, to me, AI cannot only be our governance, it should only be focused on creating a regulatory safeguard and be prepared for the exam. But we also think about the governance of AI in light of customer experience. I think I always go back to the customer experience and there's a good reason for that, right? Because if we don't hit that mark right, then none of these things that you build to protect against regulatory body matters.

It doesn't matter anymore because you don't have a business to protect anymore, right? So also you have to factor that in. Now I'm going to give a good example. And again, this is something much bigger. I'm going to give you a little preview of what I'm kind of trying to build out of one of the modules.

Right. In today's environment you have electronic communication monitoring happening, right? Advisors and everybody communicating with the customers. A lot of the tools that's available out there are shifting towards AI, but I still feel that they might fall short because right now they're using lexicon, right? You have a bank of keywords that you search for.

Right. What I'm trying to build is an end to end compliance program Platform, which will learn about who the advisor is from the inception. It will learn about all of his customer, what they do. It will learn about how they interact on a daily basis and every time there's an email communication, there's a post. The AI is not looking for a particular word, but the AI is looking for behavior.

It is looking for behavior that is in conflict with what that advisor is supposed to do for the customer. And if that behavior is captured, that behavior is flagged to be analyzed for that. That is the power of AI. So forget the governance from the regulatory center for a second. Think about how you want to build the AI, right?

Because now you're not going after advisors saying one wrong word or not saying the wrong word, but still the messaging is wrong. How are you capturing that? That is what I'm hoping to capture with this AI.

Richard Walker: 23:11

Wow. So I'm just trying to wrap my head around this, that means your AI is going to be looking at a lot of different data. A lot of different entry points. Yes. Which is a lot of compliance problems, right?

Because you're getting a lot of PII potentially. Are you stripping it out? Are you not storing it? Are you just pattern recognizing and then storing the patterns?

Paranj Patel: 23:31

So PII data is very limited, right? From what I'm trying to do, I don't think I'm going to need a lot of PII data, for example. I'm going to it's like a social security date of birth name and address. What I'm trying to do is limited, right? But to answer your question, I am going to have access to that.

Right. That is because it's part of the client profile. There are 1 or 2 ways to kind of cut it right at the inception of the data into the LM model. We can scrub those out if we don't need it, or we can mask them out as we don't need it. But more importantly, the way we are building this LMS, they're going to be siloed.

They're not going to be out there connected somewhere where this data can be easily hacked in or going. We're looking to create an independent environment for these eyes to operate for each firm independently. That is the best possible way I can protect this data within the firm. But then also it goes back to what we talked about data lineage, right? Do we have the data that is verified already?

If I already have that verified data, I may not need every single piece of data. I could use certain assumptions within my model to provide the service I need, because I know the basis of that assumption is solidified at the inception of the data. So there are nine ways to. There are multiple ways to skin this cat. But I think the closest one that I think I like to do is because I don't want to only cover PII.

I want to cover a lot. There are so much other data.

Richard Walker: 25:04

I mean, honestly, what this is sounding like to me is you're giving advisors their own personal chief compliance officer to work right next to them.

Paranj Patel: 25:13

And you. That is going to be part of the name. So that's why I didn't say it. So there's a lot going to happen. It's going to be covered. It's going to have a bunch of different modules. Right. And, and it's going to be like, I'm going to do a component.

Oba oversight St oversight, right. Supervision, supervision is going to be like on steroids because today's supervision is very linear, right? You're a trade coming in. It looks at an account, looks at the customer profile. Is it meeting the objective yes or no.

And it will either flag green, yellow or red. Right. Very basic. A register app looking at the computer will look at it. Take a look at a couple of different things.

Look at the account history and yes or no. That's right. We're going to take all that out. We're going to take all that out. We're not playing guessing games anymore.

The AI will know exactly what that client wants. How does that client behave? What does the trading pattern look like? What does the risk appetite look like? It's just not someone saying okay, I'm aggressive or I'm conservative.

Those are not good benchmarks. Well, because that's all we had before. But I wanted to create a profile of each customer and the advisor and how they interact.

Richard Walker: 26:31

I think you're talking about a totally different class of AI agents.

Paranj Patel: 26:35

Yes.

Richard Walker: 26:35

Because I think when you look at you look at some of the people I've had on the show, Zox jumps. They're darlings of our industry right now. They've grown like crazy. It's super amazing. But everybody's like, oh, they're note takers.

They're actually doing workflows. They're building processes and all these things. And so agents have been kind of thought of as facilitating a process, performing a job in a process, performing a series of steps in a process. Yeah. You're not talking about that.

You're talking about more like a team member, somebody who has oversight over the whole thing. I've done something really similar because I'm building software with AI and I have built my chief of staff, the chief of staff sits on my side of the table and helps me understand what is coming up with the software itself, because believe me, I don't write code anymore, so I don't know all the things. The Chief of staff's job is to understand the big picture and the whole thing happening at once, and be my advisor and guide along the way. To me, that's what this sounds like: a totally different class of agent. Do you agree or.

Paranj Patel: 27:34

Yes it is. It is because there are a lot of competitive competitors because we did our Tam analysis as we are kind of going to start going out to the investors and all those different things. We have the fun things we're going to start doing, where we're going to spend more money to get money, as always, works, right? One other thing we kind of stick out on is that we're looking at the market and a lot of time, I'll give you a good example. One of the broker dealers that we were working on, because that's our first client where we're going to install this in, is a, he's a small broker dealer, primarily deals with the private equities and various various different things.

And he pays money for CCO through his nose and his compliance people for through his nose. And he's like, some of these things are so basic that if I have a tool that can do 80% of the job, I don't need them. I can be CEO and CTO at the same time. Well, that's fantastic for that individual because he's running a small shop, but by law, he has to have a compliance officer. So if you hire a full time compliance officer, you're dropping 250 to $300,000 a year easily, right?

Sure. The moment you take away 80% to 90% of the compliance officer at work, and if you can build something out, that CEO can become CEO and CTO at the same time and be compliant and grow the business because he has this tool that's going to take care of the rest of this stuff. Of course, there's going to be an audit trail, there's going to be OSHA, there's going to be reporting, there's going to be exam ready documentation. There's going to be a million different things that's going to go into this. But that is the whole point of that, right?

So what I'm trying to do is I'm going to try to help smaller firms reduce the compliance expenses from 60 to 80% if they can with this tool. And that is what I'm after.

Richard Walker: 29:29

And I think that's the smart way to look at it. You're not expecting the tool to actually replace the human. You're minimizing the effort the human has to go through. That's spot on. Right?

And so chief compliance officer who has a bigger firm just means they can do more, be more compliant, they can enhance their abilities and not do the rote work and the detail work, etc.. And I love that way of thinking. I don't think AI is replacing people, even though I'm building software to build autonomous software, and therefore you don't need an engineer per se. I just don't agree with that model in the sense that you want to move people up. You want to elevate them to higher level thinking and higher end work that the AI is just not doing.

Paranj Patel: 30:10

Absolutely. And I'm still not, even though when we build this out, I'm planning to build this out, still have an old familiarity with it, right? What I meant by that is you would have a DAC tag. That means you're going to have approval levels within AI. AI is just not going to have free will to say, okay, yeah, I'm going to reject these guys.

Obey. No, you're going to have an approval process within the DAC tag. Yeah. Right. It's going to shoot out notifications saying, hey, I reviewed this.

The PSC, these traits look good. You might want to take a look at this one quick thing. Let me know if you're okay with it. Then we're going to pass it right. Those kinds of mechanisms are going to happen.

It's also going to have to report out for the CTO, right? The report is going to indicate, hey, these are the things we looked at. These are the breakages you had. These are the gaps you had. These are the recommended action plans.

You need to take that right. What we are doing now is we're taking what historically used to happen is you have a compliance department. They'll do a testing for the last one year of the transaction and they will issue a report. And by the time the report is issued, an action plan is put in place. You already are a year and a half behind.

Richard Walker: 31:11

Right?

Paranj Patel: 31:11

You already are a year and a half behind on this one. You're you're you're bleeding. Could have stopped last year. If you have real time AI telling you exactly where the problem is, because majority of the firm kids, you don't realize how much they bleed until they realize they're bleeding.

Richard Walker: 31:28

Yeah, that's the truth.

Paranj Patel: 31:30

And this is real time. This is going to change. We're not testing for six months out. We're not doing monitoring for six months out. We're not doing any of those things retrospectively looking.

We're doing everything live just like what you said with your forums, right? Yeah. Why accept a forum with bad data just to go back to the customer? Why can't we just validate the data right off the bat? Same concept.

Why do I have to find out about a problem six months from now, which has been compounded by that time, by the time I got it.

Richard Walker: 32:03

Right, and you might have penalties and fees accruing.

Paranj Patel: 32:06

There you have it. So that is what I'm looking to change.

Richard Walker: 32:09

I love, I love this, I'm so, so happy that you're focused on something that I don't know that much about with the compliance. I don't want to know what you know about compliance, thankfully. But that's amazing. And I'm running out of time. So before I get to my very last question, help people find and connect with you.

What's the best way to find you and connect?

Paranj Patel: 32:28

So the best way to connect with me is definitely the website you say, you know, www.clearlinesgroup.com, you'll find a lot more information about what I do and what kind of services I provide. There's a direct link to set up a time with me where you will see my availability, and you can definitely set that up. You can also shoot me a note, which is my first name, paranj.patel@clearlinesgroup.com, because that's one of the best ways to get back to me.

Richard Walker: 32:56

We'll put all this in.

Paranj Patel: 32:57

And of course, of course. Through you.

Richard Walker: 32:59

Hey. Yeah. Of course. All right. So I get to ask one of my favorite questions at the end of my shows, which is who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

Paranj Patel: 33:13

Oh, there's one person. I mean, there are many there, there are many in my life that I can be very grateful because to me, mentorship is everything okay? If anybody claims that they got where they are without a mentor, they're lying to you. Okay. To me, Hassan Ibrahim, he has been my mentor for over ten years.

He is his attorney himself in this particular space, in a regulatory space. One of the one of the most amazing things I liked about him is he cut through a lot of the nonsense, right. And a noise. He was able to identify a talent when he saw one, and he knew the potential. And not only him.

He noticed that, but he invested in that. He invested so heavily that he made something like this that you look at it. Right. So I'm trying to do the same. Right.

I talked to a lot of younger kids nowadays, right? They reach out to me. For example, one of my buddies' son is graduating college and he reached out to me. I told him, call me anytime, come here anytime. I'll help to help you out, right?

Why? Because someone has done that to me, right? Yeah, I'm just passing it on. So kudos to him. You know, without him, I would not be here.

Richard Walker: 34:30

We don't have time to talk about your actual background of how you grew up, but oh my gosh, is it a story to hear and the strife that you went through, the absolute zero that, you know, at the bottom of, of everything that you grew from is just an amazing story in itself. And I'm sure you get to tell it on other shows. I wish, I wish we could just do that show.

Paranj Patel: 34:49

Well, yeah, I'll tell you what. If you know if this episode goes well, maybe we can talk about a movie deal.

Richard Walker: 34:55

Yeah, let's do it. All right, to wrap this up, I want to give a big thank you to Paranj Patel, founder and CEO of ClearLines Group, and the founder of CLG Compliance Leadership Group for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out our website at clearlinesgroup.com. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com, where we make processing forms easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion.

We'll click the like button, share this with someone, and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins Bronze. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Paranj Patel: 35:30

Thank you, Rich, and thank you to your audience.

Outro: 35:33

Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.