Simplifya, NatureTrak, and HDCS jointly announce a strategic alliance to provide a comprehensive, cost-effective solution to help financial institutions build and maintain compliant and profitable cannabis banking programs.
Despite legal cannabis markets in 35 states, and continuing record-breaking sales growth, the financial services industry has been reluctant to bank the industry due to the risks associated with Anti-Money Laundering and Bank Secrecy Act regulations.
While it remains federally illegal, the cannabis industry is compelled to comply with a myriad of competing laws and regulations. Navigating the minefield of often changing requirements can be difficult for cannabis businesses and represents a significant challenge for financial institutions to ensure that they and their CRB (cannabis-related business) customers maintain operations in compliance with all state and local regulations. This challenge of implementing and managing a compliant cannabis-banking program for financial institutions can be a complicated, resource intense, and time-consuming undertaking.
As leaders in the cannabis compliance marketplace, Simplifya, NatureTrak, and HDCS have formed an alliance to provide financial institutions with a comprehensive, efficient solution to implement and manage a successful, profitable cannabis banking program.
Simplifya is the leading provider of regulatory and operational compliance systems, and its Oversight Portal provides financial institutions with insight into the compliance status of their CRB customers. NatureTrak offers an enterprise software solution built for financial institutions that bank CRBs; streamlining operations across risk mitigation, risk scoring, pre-deposit verification, electronic transaction verification, entity and license verifications, standard cannabis industry metrics, and much more from a single platform. HDCS (Higher-Risk Deposit Compliance Solutions) assists financial institutions in developing cannabis banking programs including policies, controls, enterprise risk management, enhanced due diligence, monitoring, and reporting for management and regulators. Together, the three companies provide a comprehensive solution to assist financial institutions in establishing and scaling cannabis banking programs safely and profitably.
“As a former bank CEO and builder of de-novo banks, this is the kind of comprehensive solution that I would need in order to feel comfortable with banking the cannabis industry,” said Andy Montgomery, CEO and founder of HDCS. “Simplifya is the standard-bearer in ensuring that its licensed cannabis customers become and remain legally compliant with the myriad of state and local laws and NatureTrak offers a single technology platform which is very comprehensive, easy to use, and works with every “seed to sale” system to monitor the daily transactions of each cannabis business.”
“Simplifya was a pioneer in creating standards, protocols, and audit systems to help hundreds of cannabis businesses in their requirements for compliance,” said Marion Mariathasan, CEO of Simplifya. “Our ‘Oversight Platform’ provides financial institutions with real-time visibility into each customer’s compliance record and audits.”
The legal cannabis industry will generate nearly $20 billion in revenue in 2020. Most law enforcement experts believe that the illegal or illicit cannabis industry dwarfs the legal industry, causes myriad consumer safety issues and is substantially reducing the tax revenues that were projected when various state cannabis initiatives were passed.
“Servicing cannabis businesses inside the banking system is simply safer and produces higher tax revenues than keeping them outside of the banking system,” explained Jontae James, CEO of NatureTrak. “The software platform we developed for financial institutions can monitor all cannabis transactions from seed to sale and identify any anomalies. This provides the financial institution with the ability to restrict transactions that may not be legal and protect its clients against adverse findings in audits.”
The three companies are actively engaging with financial institutions interested in providing banking services to the cannabis industry. The alliance was formed anticipating that the number of financial institutions looking to serve the cannabis industry will rapidly increase with the advent of federal safe cannabis banking regulations.
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Simplifya (www.simplifya.com) is the leading regulatory and operational compliance software platform serving the cannabis industry. Its platform provides user-friendly software that enables cannabis businesses to stay compliant with all state and local laws and regulations.
HDCS (www.hdcompliance.com) is a banker developed and managed company, which provides comprehensive solutions to financial institutions that are interested in banking the cannabis industry. We provide a vast array of digital content including cannabis-related policies and procedures, risk assessments, audits, enhanced due diligence, training protocols and reporting. In addition, HDCS can also serve as an ongoing extension of your compliance team to vet, audit and monitor the activity of cannabis-related businesses (CRB’s). Finally, HDCS can help financial institutions attract compliant and legal cannabis businesses to build and scale a profitable and safe program.
NatureTrak (www.naturetrak.com) offers an enterprise risk management solution that is built for financial institutions that bank cannabis – streamlining your operations across risk mitigation, risk scoring (through its proprietary Marijuana Anomaly Detection (MAD) cannabis rules-based engine), cash pre-deposit verification, electronic transaction verification, entity and license verifications, standard cannabis industry metrics and much more — all from a single platform. After vetting multiple solutions, HDCS has determined that NatureTrak is the best and most comprehensive technology solution for managing cannabis banking risk, pre-verifying all deposits, monitoring transactions, and the overall compliance of cannabis businesses with laws and regulations. Having one technology with all of this functionality and that contains a complete record of your cannabis banking activity is critical to scaling efficiently, effectively, and safely.