PODCAST
Using Data to Stay Ahead of Risk: Introducing FINRA’s StratIntel Team
As the financial industry continues to evolve, it's important to stay ahead of emerging risks and trends. On this episode of FINRA Unscripted, the leaders of FINRA's new Strategic Intelligence and Analytics (StratIntel) team discuss how they are working to identify and analyze these industry developments.
On this episode, we sit down with the leaders of the StratIntel team: Senior Vice President of Data and Analytics for Member Supervision Jim Reese, and his two Vice Presidents, Brita Bayatmakou and Clint Johnson. The three share insights on how this new team is evolving FINRA's approach to intelligence gathering and risk monitoring, and the innovative ways they are using data and analytics to support FINRA's mission of investor protection and market integrity.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
2025 Regulatory Oversight Report
Episode 168: Investing Wisely in 2025: Avoiding Scams and Achieving Your Financial Goals
Episode 169: Unpacking FINRA’s 2025 Regulatory Oversight Report
Listen and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Below is a transcript of the episode. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human editors and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - 00:18
Margherita Beale: As the financial industry continues to evolve, it's important to stay ahead of emerging risks and trends. In this episode, we sit down with the leaders of FINRA’s new strategic intelligence and analytics team to discuss how they're working to identify and analyze these industry developments.
00:28 - 00:47
Margherita Beale: Welcome to FINRA Unscripted. I'm one of your co-hosts, Margherita Beale. I'm pleased to welcome a few new guests to the show today to introduce us to the StratIntel team within Member Supervision. Joining me are Senior Vice President Jim Reese, who leads the team, and his two vice presidents, Brita Bayatmakou and Clint Johnson. Welcome.
00:47 - 00:48
Jim Reese: Thanks for having us.
00:49 - 00:55
Margherita Beale: Great. So to start us off, can you each introduce yourselves and share a bit about your background? Jim, let's start with you.
00:55 - 01:22
Jim Reese: Thank you again for the opportunity. My name is Jim Reese. I'm the senior vice president over the new Strategic Intelligence and Analytics organization. I've been at FINRA for almost three years now, and prior to this role, I led the data analytics organization within Member Supervision. I spent most of my life as a regulator coming from the SEC after 23 years there, all within the Division of Examinations and leaving there as its chief risk and strategy officer.
01:22 - 01:25
Margherita Beale: Great. Thank you. Jim. What about you, Brita?
01:26 - 02:37
Brita Bayatmakou: Thank you, Margherita, firstly, for inviting me back to the show. Great to be back again. I am the vice president of Strategic and Threat Intelligence at FINRA within Member Supervision's organization, and I joined FINRA back in 2021. So, it's been about three and a half years here at FINRA. And I stepped into this role at the new year. So, in my first couple of weeks here, it has certainly been a very exciting transition, and also been a bit of a full circle moment for me, having previously worked on and built-up financial intelligence functions in my past professional life, before FINRA at Charles Schwab and before that at Wells Fargo, specifically, a little bit more on the financial crimes focused side. For a little bit of context, my FINRA Unscripted debut was about a year into my time at FINRA as I was just crystallizing my former organization, the Cyber and Analytics Unit, which was established to conduct complex investigations in the cybersecurity, cyber-enabled fraud and crypto disciplines. So, those teams were staffed by some incredibly talented individuals and leaders who really brought innovation to our mission of identifying and anticipating increasing concerns in those areas.
02:37 - 03:09
Brita Bayatmakou: So, as we really watched the threats in the cyber and crypto spaces evolve, those teams increasingly provided training and support, often building out our network that really supported our intelligence sharing strategy. So, as we increasingly and proactively disseminated intel, this was an area I was really excited about and saw as a great opportunity. So I'm so happy to be able to contribute on a larger scale in my new role in this newly established organization that directly supports FINRA's goal of being an intelligence-led enterprise.
03:10 - 03:17
Margherita Beale: Perfect. Well, welcome back to the podcast, Brita, and thank you for giving us that overview. And last but not least, Clint.
03:18 - 04:10
Clint Johnson: Thank you. Yes, I'm a vice president of Intelligence Analytics underneath Jim Reese. And I've been in a number of capacities with FINRA and the precursor NASD since 1998, worked in a number of programs, whether it be firm exams, risk monitoring, which at the time we call it surveillance and special project work. And in that capacity, it led me to developing a number of dashboards for metric monitoring and reporting for the various regulatory programs that I worked in, out of the district, in the southeast region. And then ultimately, that led me to further my analytics journey, where I began an immersion program with the precursor to StratIntel, where I developed a number of tools to inform risk monitoring and risk assessments. And I'm excited today to be given the opportunity to lead the teams that are responsible for intelligence analytics within Member Supervision.
04:10 - 04:26
Margherita Beale: Great. Thank you Clint. We're very excited to have the three of you on today. So to start us off, Jim, can you give us a high level overview of the StratIntel team and how it fits within FINRA and its role as a self-regulatory organization more broadly?
04:27 - 04:59
Jim Reese: Absolutely. So I really think of the StratIntel team as a centralized intelligence unit that looks to identify, analyze, and assess broader industry risks and trends and themes to generate strategic intelligence and actionable insights for a lot of our partners, both inside FINRA and external to these walls. So it's really an organization—we'll talk about this during our discussion today—made up of human intel analysts, subject matter experts from the industry, from vast experience here at FINRA, data analysts and data scientists and engineers.
04:59 - 05:58
Jim Reese: We also work hand-in-hand with regulatory departments to share and contextualize outcomes, with a goal of more proactively accomplishing our investor protection and market integrity mandates. So when I think about the organization, one would like to characterize our role is really that we're the zoom out function, that broader look, the forest from the trees, being able to peek around corners earlier than waiting to be to the end of the block. But we also push out intelligence to member firms, industry participants, and we'll partner with FINRA's Investor Education team around investor alerts, for example. And I mentioned about pushing out intelligence to member firms. I think this uniquely positions us as a self-regulatory organization. We'll highlight some more examples later on in the conversation, but as we share intelligence back to our member firms, we're uniquely positioned within our SRO models to collect and disseminate information given our ability to engage directly and frequently with our member firms, whether that's through our risk monitoring function or a firm examination function, or a number of the other activities that we perform throughout the enterprise.
05:59 - 06:10
Margherita Beale: Great. So, Jim, this team is relatively new. Can you tell us why it was created and how the team has evolved as the threats in the industry have evolved alongside it?
06:11 - 06:47
Jim Reese: Yeah, no, you characterize it perfectly. We are new. We just announced this just a few months ago. So very exciting times. And really, the goal of this dedicated team was to do just that. Tap individuals within member supervision that could dedicate and be accountable for more strategic intelligence. And what we found over time is that we had so many individuals, talented individuals, innovative individuals that were doing some type of activity like this, either directly within one part of the organization or, as we like to say, off the side of their desk, kind of in their spare time, as they were also managing their other daily and day-to-day activities.
06:47 - 07:33
Jim Reese: So the big picture here is the industry-wide analyses to inform the direction of our regulatory programs and not just a single program or department. We really trying to move the needle around, being proactive, and Member Supervision leadership built out StratIntel organically, as I said, pulling from existing parts of the organization and aligning around this critical need. In addition to our more strategic approach, StratIntel is also intimately involved in engagement and support around critical market events, but with an eye on broader industry risks. So, for example, what did we know about the firm or products before there was an issue and what was the outcome? I think if we start to kind of really encapsulate and quantify these things over time, it will enable us to become more proactive and, in some cases, even predictive.
07:33 - 07:56
Jim Reese: And to your point about how we evolve as the industry evolves, StratIntel also houses the newly created model oversight function led by Urie Tucker. This new function will be driving our strategy around identifying risks posed by the industry's use of models, and our assessment of model risk management and governance programs as it relates, for example, to FINRA Supervision Rule 3110.
07:56 - 08:05
Margherita Beale: Great. Thank you. So Brita and Clint, I would love to hear a bit more about each of your roles and focuses. Brita, can we start with you?
08:06 - 09:24
Brita Bayatmakou: Yeah. And, you know, I just want to back up one moment and piggyback off of your previous question as we think about why this organization was created. I mentioned I was previously overseeing our Cyber Analytics Unit, which sat within the Complex Investigations and Intelligence team within our National Cause and Financial Crimes Detection program. So we were performing intelligence-type activities, and there are pockets of intelligence collection really across FINRA in a variety of different groups. And I think leadership recognized that that function should not be limited just to one particular department or corner. And so we really made a commitment in establishing this larger organization to broaden our scope and our reach by centralizing and formalizing the team as Jim noted, bringing this already existing financial intelligence unit with other groups to truly unlock, I think, what we're trying to do here at FINRA as an organization. So as we endeavor to embed that intelligence mindset, using data to drive and inform our decisions, this is just a fantastic opportunity and it shows how we're getting comfortable in the face of uncertainty. We are getting comfortable being more agile so that we can transform what we're doing and really respond to shifting winds.
09:24 - 10:29
Brita Bayatmakou: So my new organization, the Strategic and Threat Intelligence team, is really here, as Jim noted, to scan the horizon and think about how events or trends might impact either FINRA directly or our key stakeholders, whether it's investors, member firms or the markets. Our mission really is to identify and assess emerging risks across the landscape. So bringing in this structure is a way to uncover what risks or threats or early warning signs might be out there and really to manage what's coming. We're also here to think about what opportunities there might be out there. I think having a formalized intelligence team really enables and empowers us to not only predict potential emerging risks, but also to make informed regulatory decisions where there might be an opportunity or unknown opportunity, rather than a risk that can reduce friction that might be out there. So while we're in the business, certainly of looking at possible risks, we also leverage this capability to see what opportunities are there for us.
10:30 - 0:35
Margherita Beale: Great. Thank you. And Clint, if you can tell us a bit about Intelligence Analytics, your team.
10:36 - 11:39
Clint Johnson: Sure. Part of my role is to lead and oversee the team dedicated to developing, delivering and expanding and intelligence, analytics and modeling solutions within Member Supervision, and provide data driven information that can inform actionable insights, intelligence, and further drive risk based decision-making at FINRA. So within that mandate, we are striving to help automate manual tasks and allow the Member Supervision regulatory teams to make smarter decisions with greater ease with tools that are centered around actionable regulatory insights. Those are things that drive value to our regulatory programs, whether that be firm exams or National Cause or risk monitoring. Yes, those are key stakeholders as well as Brita's team in the StratIntel space, but also other groups inside FINRA. And that could be groups outside of member supervision, such as Advertising Regulation or Corporate Finance or Enforcement. These are groups all with a significant need for analytics to inform their risk-based programs, as well as their interactions with member firms, because a better informed regulator is able to take more meaningful actions in timely ways.
11:39 - 12:50
Clint Johnson: And as Jim mentioned, one of the goals of our team is to lean into the opportunities that may be more predictive, as opposed to simply just describing things that are happening, but maybe anticipate things that may yet to come. More specifically, my team is made up of really three main groups: data specialists, data science team, and then also graph solutions. They work generally independently but also collaboratively as the work dictates. But data specialists, they're really engaging with exam and investigative teams. And they develop something called a proof of concept analytics that support those matters. Recent examples would be analytics that identify retail trading and riskier, complex products, which can be used to assist in analyzing firms and maybe dictating where we should use our resources from an investigative standpoint or where we shouldn't, more importantly. Also, there are analytics that could analyze large volumes of electronic communications to inform exam decisions so that we're making more timely and better informed decisions about what we do in our work, which will increase the efficiency of those matters, but also might allow us to not put resources where we otherwise would have, had we not had that information.
12:50 - 14:12
Clint Johnson: The data specialist team provides input into Brita's team efforts to inform or contextualize material patterns or trends in their work. The second team, the data science team, is more engaged as data scientists in complex modeling, generative AI, large language models and natural language processing type tools, and more recently, they also handle a portfolio of the risk assessment related tools that FINRA's monitoring uses. To put some context into that, examples would be staff resource planning models for the efficiency in exams and resource allocation or exam planning models, which firms should we be going to on an annual exam plan or in the context of natural language processing, they have tools that can significantly automate our review of annual audits, where the tool is reading the audit and facilitating review of those audits within risk monitoring. The last group, third and final, is knowledge graph solutions, which recognizes that we live in a complex world of firm business activities and numerous affiliates and people connections and regulatory programs with common touch points. This team supports a FINRA tool that permits staff to discover and visualize these complex relationships between entities, between firms, documents and everything in between, to identify any material regulatory events, and discover what might be nonobvious relationships through data visualization and mining.
14:13 - 14:19
Margherita Beale: Great. Thank you. So how do you identify the threats that your team focuses on?
14:20 - 15:04
Clint Johnson: Well, we do follow the intelligence lifecycle, and I know Brita is going to speak on that shortly, but we're part of that process. And included in that is we pick up threats and emerging threats from headline news, internal groups such as Brita's team, such as keeping a pulse on new developments as things evolve and emerge in the market, but also our various exam programs, they have some pattern in trend recognition and they share out what they're learning. We have regular touch points with those teams, as well as risk monitoring, which also is looking at patterns and trends among their body of work and sharing out what they're observing in terms of material patterns or trends that we should be aware of and might represent opportunities to create some analytics around to further inform that particular pattern or trend.
15:05 - 15:36
Clint Johnson: You also are going to see a lot of these called out in various communications from FINRA. More recently is the 2024 Annual Exam Program letter, where they have a multitude of topics outlined and know that those are significantly those are aligned with the topical areas that are in our regulatory programs, so that there is some transparency on what is important to FINRA. It should be on the radar of the industry so that they understand the things that we're looking for and can also inform their internal compliance programs.
15:37 - 16:54
Brita Bayatmakou: So as we think about how we identify threats. It is a great question. We really have to take a step back, because there is so much data and information out there, and we have to take into account the biases that exist, as well as the context within which that data sits. If you think about FINRA, we ingest, I think something like 400 billion records per day. When you think about market events, in addition to incoming tips and complaints, and we have a senior helpline, we have incoming member applications as well as ongoing meetings with external partners and working groups. So there's a ton of information. So how do we sift through all that information? And I think our ability to successfully identify the right threats and develop strategy and inform our regulatory decisions really hinges on two main things. One, how much we embrace and foster an environment of risk taking and innovation team. Clint's team is a perfect example of this, advocating for ideas and projects that leverage new and developing technology, whether it's machine learning or AI, really important in terms of how we are going to be working together and secondly, how well we understand the nature of the threat and risk or the adversary, depending on what we're talking about, as well as the ecosystem within which it's working.
16:54 - 18:24
Brita Bayatmakou: We live in this fast paced, incredibly technologically advanced environment where humans are an incredibly important component to that. So understanding what the ecosystem looks like, understanding who we are protecting at FINRA, what is that investor demographic, what is the market look like, and what might those vulnerabilities be to really inform which threats we focus on. And as I think I mentioned earlier, we really have to bring that specialized skill set to come at these problems and bring structure in a very transparent and collaborative way so that we can triangulate and use our best analytical judgment to surface the red flags and see those patterns and trends that will ultimately provide actionable insights for our partners. And as Clint mentioned, we look through that framework of the intelligence cycle. And our teams are grounded in this process, which if anyone Googles the term that they'll see different versions of it, but it's essentially an ongoing process where you look at planning, you look at requirements or issues that need to be addressed that can be informed by priorities of your different stakeholders. Secondly, the collection of intelligence processing and exploitation of that information, the analysis and production and then dissemination of the intelligence. So, we really think about that ongoing evaluation and feedback loop resulting in finished intel products and, again, adapting as we go.
18:25 - 00:19:26
Jim Reese: And I would just add Brita and Clint made excellent points. And that ecosystem that we're talking about has a lot of different regulatory levers. And that's why partnerships across member supervision across regulatory operations and FINRA and our technology teams and our trading teams. And with the industry is critical, right? Because, you know, when I talk about different levers that we can pull, sometimes we have an issue or a threat or something that's emerging that we might just want to monitor. We want to make people aware of it. If there's an adversarial aspect to it, we want to get that out to the industry as quickly, as efficiently as we possibly can. And some other areas that are emerging. Maybe we need to upskill our staff to better understand how this issue is permeating through the industry, or how this new product trades. Or maybe we need to partner with another part of FINRA to push out information to investors. Or maybe it needs to be the focus of a thematic review, let's say. So there's a lot of different ways in which we can begin to address an issue. And it really is part of that intelligence cycle that Brita mentioned to really kind of put it around kind of the planning for this as we scan across the horizon.
19:26 - 19:55
Clint Johnson: And, Jim, something I'd add is just to put another point on that, not all threats, whether it be intelligence regarding a real time cyber risk or emerging patterns and trends in risky and complex products necessarily lead to a firm exam, to Jim's point. Some will lead to some key notices or alerts that's shared with the industry, much of which is found on FINRA.org, including frequently asked questions and other guidance via our topics pages. And it's a great resource that's released to the industry.
19:56 - 20:07
Margherita Beale: So you briefly mentioned partnerships across FINRA. So I'm curious to know how often do you see overlap with the work of others across FINRA and beyond?
20:08 - 21:12
Brita Bayatmakou: I will say as an intelligence group, it is our job to overlap with others in the organization and really break down any silos that may exist. I think intelligence itself, the word, is not a very well understood term. It evokes concepts of secrecy, of surveillance, of unknowns and darkness. But in fact, it's quite the opposite of what we're doing as an intelligence-led organization. We are constantly collaborating and as I mentioned earlier, there are already existing pockets of intelligence collection across FINRA, my former team being just one of those areas where we were really focused on it. And this new organization really affords us the opportunity to pull together those different pieces of intelligence collection and dissemination. I think it's exciting that we get to work on integration and leveraging all the potentially unexploited information that's out there and really better equip not only ourselves, but also the industry in terms of understanding the financial landscape.
21:14 - 21:21
Margherita Beale: So, Jim, can you tell us a bit about how your team prioritizes the different threats and investigations that come through the door?
21:22 - 22:39
Jim Reese: Building out what Brita touched upon, we do have experience leveraging methodology around threat prioritization, and we really err on the side of being over inclusive and taking on an inventory of what we're interested in. And that, again, starts with building partnerships across Member Supervision and across Regulatory Operations and FINRA at large. Our approach is really trying to understand in a specific area or a nascent issue, is there kind of a butterfly effect, if you will, of a decision in one part of the market having broader impact on another, a concentration in a particular vendor, or a lack of vendors in this particular space, a new product or a new type of strategy that is being sold, or one part of the industry pulling out of a certain business practice and another part of the industry getting into a new business area. All of those things can have broader implications to our investor protection and market integrity mandates. So as we collect this information, we put it through this sieve, if you will, of risk management and threat prioritization, in which we're trying to better understand the impact, the likelihood, the severity, and the only way that we can even begin to quantify that is to have close working relationships with the risk monitoring analysts with the firm, exam folks with the investigatory units, and the National Cause and Financial Crimes area.
22:39 - 23:07
Jim Reese: So, we work with these partners and we collectively look at and determine, again, what is the output of what we're seeing? And where does that intelligence need to be shared? Again, it's not only shared internally, but it's also shared with our member firms and investors. As we see something on the horizon, we focus on getting that to members within our ability as an SRO to share that information out and to really have that partnership, even outside of the membership firms with other industry participants.
23:08 - 23:16
Margherita Beale: Great. Thank you. So can you share some of the recent work or accomplishments that have come from the StratIntel team?
23:17 - 24:19
Clint Johnson: One, we have a very talented group of staff and there are a large number of accomplishments, but I'd like to just call out one recent example, and it pertains to the CrowdStrike cyber event in July of last year. It related to a disruption that was caused by a software update, leading to widespread system outages on Microsoft Windows devices at selected number of member firms. At the time, we knew that Risk Monitoring had conducted a vendor survey to the industry and collected information regarding use of vendors. Some of that survey that was challenged by written responses. So our analytics team assisted in processing and analyzing what was unstructured data to identify those firms potentially impacted by the CrowdStrike event. With the output of that tool, FINRA staff were then well positioned to respond and support the impacted member firms through various outreach efforts that raised awareness and also allowed FINRA to assess the impact to their businesses in a timely manner.
24:20 - 25:26
Brita Bayatmakou: I think that's a really good example, Clint, of how FINRA uses information that was provided by member firms who, by the way, are really, in a lot of ways, the best eyes and ears for us, to quickly gather information about a risk or threat impacting a large number of firms. And it's not the first time we've been able to proactively alert specific firms to potential harm and really get ahead of it. The financial industry's reliance on third parties for a whole host of activities, many of them mission critical, has gone up significantly, and FINRA has observed an increase in concerns and risks around third-party issues and concerns. So when an RMA [risk monitoring analyst] reaches out to better understand how a firm might supervise or use third-party vendors, it's not to peer over the shoulder of the firm, but really it helps to provide a way to identify and get ahead of a potential threat and have a broad impact on the entire industry in a positive sense. So we have been able to better understand the technological infrastructure that can be shared across many firms to really prevent adverse impact.
25:26 - 27:02
Brita Bayatmakou: So, I can cite a whole host of FINRA rules or Regulation S-P. But as an intelligence organization, we're here more interested in thinking broadly about protecting that financial ecosystem and consumers, either from individual harm or market moving events. So those are good examples of how we successfully been able to paint a broader picture, disseminate information quickly, and anticipate what possible weaknesses might exist so that we can plug the holes. I'll touch on a couple other accomplishments of the team. Although we're a new organization, we do bring staff over that have had a lot of great accomplishments in this space. Beyond the intelligence, ongoing partnerships, and increasing collaboration with our partners, we produce finished intel products that take the shape of different publication types, whether it's a strategic or tactical intelligence report or, as was referenced in a previous podcast, a threat intelligence product, which is a newly established type of publication that has been pushed out on several occasions now over the last year, whether it's on investment club scams or adversarial use of AI, among other topics. So we've pushed out quite a few of those. We've also developed what we call FINRA intelligence advisories. After determining the need to create a method to provide intelligence to nonfinancial, non-securities, private industry stakeholders, which has been very successful as well. So these are a couple examples of the kind of work that we put out and hope to continue to expand in terms of our suite of products.
27:03 - 27:14
Margherita Beale: Well, thank you both for sharing those. So, as we talk about these accomplishments and in general, the work that your team does, are there any effective practices that listeners can pull from these?
27:16 - 28:08
Brita Bayatmakou: I'll say there's so much information out there. And to stay relevant, you have to evolve. The landscape is changing so fast. And when we think about AI or crypto or quantum computing or geopolitical unrest, the sooner firms and individuals can get comfortable in the face of uncertainty and start to really assess and zoom out and really take a look at all that information, the better you'll be able to remove blind spots and really propel your organization forward with the confidence that comes with that information to implement a more strategic, more proactive decision making posture. So I think maybe it's not your traditional effective practice, but remaining curious, really thinking outside the box and thinking more broadly about the ecosystem within which your organization sits can be very helpful.
28:10 - 29:04
Clint Johnson: And something I would add is I wanted to speak to two areas in terms of intelligence analytics. That's really the concept of connected intelligence and taxonomies. Whereas in connected intelligence, it's applications and a data landscape at FINRA that reflects cohesion, so that there's sharing and there's connections among what would seem like a variety of business units to reduce any intelligence gaps, and limiting scenarios where there might be a silo of intelligence that exists that require manual efforts to connect across internal FINRA groups. Lack of connected intelligence can lead to regulatory programs that are reactionary to the emerging risks or market events, and we're seeking to be more proactive, and that can be done through the idea of connected intelligence. And that's something that we're working towards at FINRA actively and with great diligence.
29:04 - 30:45
Clint Johnson: With regards to taxonomies, it's really about standardizing taxonomies across the business units. Think of it as a single source of truth with regard to definitions, naming conventions, common tagging standards that give context to intelligence and support the connected intelligence. Think of it as common language. And if we all speak a common language, there's a common awareness. At FINRA, we do recognize this, and we're working hard to establish data taxonomies through the work of our data stewards, which are staff that are responsible for data access and classifications and quality, all of which is organized by FINRA's Data Management and Governance Office, which we refer to as DMGO. For additional context, often an organization has a variety of taxonomies among its business units. Everyone has their own flavor, which creates challenges in achieving understanding outside of a single business unit. In other words, the collective sense. At FINRA, for example, they're identifying patterns or trends among risky and complex securities sold to retail customers, which may be relevant to all of our regulatory programs. However, the concept of risky and complex securities can mean different things to different business units. This can create a gap at FINRA and its ability to determine overall trends or patterns from those fragmented business units or vantage points. And really limiting that cohesiveness of connecting intelligence at FINRA. We can address this particular example by having a single source of truth, or what I would call the enterprise reference data of what a risky and complex security is that is common and standardized across the business units to facilitate that cohesive sense.
30:45 - 31:10
Clint Johnson: The concepts of that regulatory intelligence is really at the center of how FINRA operates, and how our data and technology teams can help facilitate the ability to connect information in ways that generate new intelligence. And StratIntel is designed to be that uber consumer of intel outputs, as well as key facilitator in the generation and support of connected intelligence for all of FINRA, particularly Reg Ops and Member Supervision.
31:12 - 31:23
Margherita Beale: Great, thank you. So I know that we've mentioned a few resources throughout the podcast, but is there anything else in specific that you'd like to point out for our listeners in terms of FINRA resources?
31:24 - 32:27
Clint Johnson: I'm going to turn back to the FINRA website, FINRA.org and that's our gold source for resources. And referring back to the 2024 FINRA Annual Regulatory Oversight Report, which is broken out by topical areas to ease navigation for member firms so you can figure out what is applicable to your business and products and services. As previously stated, it does represent FINRA's transparency on its priorities for the coming year resulting from regulatory activities. That being said, in between the annual report, there are timely guidance and updates that are also found at FINRA.org. Things around interpreting the rules, related guidance, new emerging issues or patterns in products and services. Those two are also broken down by topical areas on our website. Those types of guidance documents include timely and very specific frequently asked questions, reference to historic and new interpretive letters, reports and studies, and also a wide variety of webinars and podcasts just like this one.
32:27 - 33:15
Brita Bayatmakou: Yeah, and don't forget, you always have your risk monitoring analysts. For those of you who are member firms out there: reach out. We want to hear from you. We're growing and we're evolving. So we are also open to input and what information is the most helpful. So beyond the alerts and advisories or the investor insights you might find on the website, there are humans behind all of that, and we are eager to engage in a variety of settings. And if you can't share or don't feel comfortable sharing directly with an organization like FINRA, then think about your peers, whether it's a peer, firm or others, because we have collective challenges on our hands that cannot be solved by one player alone. It's all about anticipating what's coming around the bend through ongoing conversation and partnership. So that would be my final thought on the resources.
33:16 - 33:25
Margherita Beale: So to wrap us up, Jim, if our listeners were to walk away remembering just one thing about the StratIntel team, what do you hope it would be?
33:26 - 34:10
Jim Reese: Well, hopefully you're not going to penalize me for just saying one thing, but I'll try to wrap it up as succinctly as I possibly can. And again, we really appreciate your time today and getting the message out here about the new organization. But we really see us as the nucleus within Member Supervision, leading the regulatory intelligence efforts, driving our threat prioritization and risk-based decisions. We're here to enable and empower our staff and leadership to identify, respond to, and predict emerging risks and broader market themes, and make more informed and timely regulatory decisions. Again, regulatory levers across Member Supervision, but also sharing that information and intelligence back out to member firms, industry, our fellow regulators, both domestically and abroad.
34:11 - 34:36
Margherita Beale: Thank you. That's it for today's episode of FINRA Unscripted. Jim, Brita and Clint, thank you so much for joining me to introduce us to your team and all the great work that you're doing. Listeners, if you don't already, be sure to subscribe to FINRA Unscripted wherever you listen to podcasts. We are now even available on YouTube. Today's episode was produced by me, Margherita Beale and edited and engineered by John Williams. Until next time.
34:36 – 34:41
Outro Music
34:41 - 35:04
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