Collaborative partnership resulted in client-led compliance solution meeting all security needs and integrating seamlessly with existing IT framework
Results:
- Custom-built compliance solution
- Easy and headache-free integration
- Third-party security needs exceeded
- Outstanding partnership and collaboration
Challenge:
Kairos Investment Management (“Kairos”) is a California-based real estate investment firm with a focus on commercial and multifamily properties.
Being also an investment advisor registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Kairos takes diligence seriously. To comply with SEC regulations mandating data retention for a number of years post-transaction, logs of written correspondence, decisions made, deal particulars, legal documents for banks or escrow agents—the list goes on—must be preserved. These also need to be organized in such a way that they can be easily accessed by Kairos’ IT team, who is often charged with locating the right files.
Kairos chose ProDeal’s award-winning deal closing platform to support its agile deal-closing approach and bring centralization to its documentation and processes. However, having such information trafficked through a third-party platform introduced an element of compliance risk for Kairos. In order for ProDeal to fully satisfy Kairos’ rigorous security and data control requirements, an additional layer of functionality was needed.
Solution:
With a focus on security and extensibility at the core of their product design, ProDeal collaborated with Kairos’ IT and compliance teams to develop a bespoke solution that would consolidate all records within ProDeal into a single location firmly in the control of the compliance team. The solution they developed integrated seamlessly into Kairos’ existing Office 365 compliance framework in a way that was efficient, easy to administer, and watertight from a compliance standpoint.
“ProDeal is one of those service providers that really cares; they’re in the top 5% of our IT vendors. If a feature doesn’t exist, they’ll say, ‘Well, let’s make it happen.’ And then they make it happen! Not a lot of vendors do that.”
David Romines
- Director of IT
Outcome:
Before even diving into the development of the custom module, ProDeal completed Kairos’ standard vendor security assessment. The evaluation was quick, thorough, and painless: ProDeal was well prepared to respond to questions about existing control mechanisms—including infosec governance, access control, incident management, facility security, remote access, directory services, network connectivity, backup and recovery, servers and storage, and alerting and monitoring, to name a few—and passed all third-party security requirements with flying colors.
As development began, ProDeal consulted with the Kairos team at every step to ensure their needs would be met with the final product. The resulting solution provided the necessary automation and centralization to support reliable data management, integrated easily into IT’s existing Office 365 compliance framework, and minimized any risk associated with conveying information through an external platform. Deployment was quick, with minimal disruption to existing workflows.
Kairos has placed ProDeal in the top echelon of its vendors on the strength of ProDeal’s commitment to client service, responsiveness, agility and willingness to collaborate. They intend to continue this effective partnership of collaboration and support well into the future.
