Customer profile
Atlantic Wealth (illustrative) is a US wealth manager serving high-net-worth households out of New York and Boston. The firm operates as both a broker-dealer and a registered investment adviser. Their compliance team answers to the SEC, FINRA, and a state securities regulator on consumer matters. They run forty advisors and approximately three billion dollars under management.
The challenge
The firm's legacy advisor platform — built ten years ago, owned by a vendor that had been acquired twice — was no longer keeping pace with regulatory expectations. Reg BI's process orientation made suitability documentation a recurring exam finding; the platform's PDFs of disclosure forms didn't constitute "process" the way the regulator wanted to see it. Producing the evidence pack for the most recent FINRA exam took eleven days of senior compliance time.
The trading workflow was equally fragile. Three custodian relationships routed through a tangle of point-to-point integrations; sequence number resets caused weekly drama; best-execution reporting was a Friday-afternoon ritual involving four spreadsheets.
Why Modir
Atlantic evaluated four vendors before settling on Modir. The decision criteria were exactly three: suitability as policy (not as PDF), trading infrastructure that didn't require a dedicated FIX team, and audit evidence the next exam would accept without follow-up.
Modir's OPA suitability package, with its risk-tier × instrument-risk decision matrix and concentration overrides, mapped directly to the firm's existing policies — but as code that the regulator could audit. The QuickFIX/J 2.3 gateway with embedded simulator removed the FIX-team-of-one staffing risk. The hash-chained audit, with signed exports, was exactly what FINRA had been signaling they wanted to see across the industry.
Implementation timeline
- Week 1 — Discovery. 90-minute architecture workshop. Output: tenant scope in
us-east-1; identity model; OPA suitability package customized to the firm's risk taxonomy; three custodian integrations identified. - Weeks 2–3 — Provision. Tenant provisioned. Zitadel projects for advisor / supervisor / compliance / ops roles. OpenFGA tuples written for advisor↔client relationships. FIX gateway connected to first custodian via simulator.
- Weeks 4–6 — Migrate. One desk (10 advisors, 250 clients) imported. Reg BI suitability questionnaire and Form CRS templates ported. First live trades through the simulator path; production FIX session brought up at end of week 6.
- Weeks 7–8 — Soft launch + exam pack. First ten advisors operational. First exam pack produced on demand; senior compliance verified content against last year's submission.
Outcomes
By the end of the eighth week, Atlantic had a parallel-running pilot for one desk, the FIX gateway was connecting to two custodians (third in flight), and the exam pack — including the OPA decision log for every approved order — was a single command. The legacy platform stayed up for the rest of the firm; Modir scope expansion to remaining desks was scheduled for Q2.
Quote
An exam pack used to take eleven days. Now it's a Modir command. The auditor literally asked us how we did it. Our compliance team's mood improved more in eight weeks than in the previous three years.
COO, Atlantic Wealth — Illustrative
Where they are today
Atlantic (illustrative) has rolled out to all four desks (40 advisors), connected three custodians, and turned on the AI commentary graph for the wealth-management business — locale-aware US English, advisor-reviewed before sending to the client. Q3 will add the AI suitability draft graph for compliance review.
Outcome metrics
- 40 advisors migrated within Q1
- 3 custodians via FIX gateway
- 11 days → 1 command exam pack
- Reg BI compliant via OPA
suitability - Best-execution auto-captured per fill
- 0 sequence resets in production
Stack
- Region: us-east-1
- Locale: en-US · Gregorian
- Trading: QuickFIX/J 2.3 + simulator
- Custodian: 3 integrations
Illustrative case study based on representative deployment patterns. Customer name, quotes, and specific numbers are illustrative.