SACRAMENTO, Calif. and DENVER – 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.”
“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.
