Ruleward is a seed-stage regulatory intelligence company based in Washington, DC. We build monitoring and gap-mapping software for compliance officers at mid-size financial services firms — the teams that carry full regulatory exposure without the staff to match.
Federal and state financial regulators publish between 200 and 400 rule changes, guidance documents, and examination findings every month — across the SEC, FINRA, CFPB, OCC, FDIC, Federal Reserve, and 50 state banking and securities authorities. Compliance teams at mid-size firms registered with multiple regulators face the full weight of this volume. The problem is not a shortage of regulatory data. Most mid-size firms already subscribe to Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence or LexisNexis. The problem is that raw feeds require analysts to read and evaluate everything, when the majority is irrelevant to the firm’s specific business lines. And none of it arrives pre-mapped to the firm’s existing policy documents.
Wilson Tremblay spent four years as a compliance officer at a DC-area registered investment adviser managing regulatory tracking for SEC and FINRA registrations. In his fourth year, a surprise FINRA risk alert arrived on a Friday afternoon. The firm had 14 written supervisory procedures. Wilson spent the next two weeks reading the alert against each procedure, making judgment calls without a structured tool, while three other regulatory publications from the same week sat unread on his desk. The firm had a Thomson Reuters subscription. The gap was not information access — the gap was that the raw feed required reading everything, and nothing in it pointed to which policy sections were affected. Wilson co-founded Ruleward in 2024 with Adaora Eze, a former software engineer at FiscalNote who had spent six years building regulatory tracking infrastructure for federal government affairs teams. The first version of the platform — a relevance-scoring layer applied to FINRA and SEC feeds, filtered by business line — was tested at two DC-area investment advisers. Both reduced their daily regulatory review time by roughly 60 percent and surfaced no new missed deadlines in the first quarter.
Ruleward today monitors regulatory publications from the SEC, FINRA, CFPB, OCC, FDIC, Federal Reserve, and all 50 state banking and securities authorities. Every publication is classified by rule type, scored for relevance against the firm’s configured business lines and regulatory registrations, and cross-referenced against the firm’s uploaded policy documents to identify which sections may need updating. Compliance officers receive a daily digest curated to their firm — not a raw feed — with effective-date countdowns, policy references, and a task assignment layer for remediation tracking. The platform also generates examination preparation briefings from FINRA examination findings reports, SEC examination priorities letters, and risk alerts, covering the areas most likely to be in scope for the firm’s next exam. And every tracked item is logged with a time-stamped audit trail, exportable in PDF or CSV format, covering a 36-month rolling history.
Coverage completeness before speed — a regulatory item that arrives late is less useful than one that arrives on time. Policy mapping over raw feeds — compliance teams need to know which of their policies are affected, not just that a new rule was published. No missed effective dates — the system should eliminate deadline failures, not just reduce them. Compliance team time is scarce — every workflow decision should be evaluated against its cost in analyst hours. Auditability is not optional — every classification, assignment, and response action the platform records should be defensible to an examiner without additional explanation from the compliance team.
Ruleward’s mission is to give mid-size financial services compliance teams the regulatory awareness of a firm three times their size. Most compliance monitoring tools deliver the same volume of raw regulatory output to every firm, regardless of whether that output is relevant to the firm’s specific registrations and business lines. Ruleward’s contribution is relevance filtering and policy integration — not just more regulatory data, but a curated view of what requires the compliance team’s attention and why. We measure success by whether a compliance officer at a 15-person team can maintain the same regulatory coverage posture as a peer at a 50-person department, without working longer hours or missing deadlines.
We work with compliance officers at mid-size financial services firms registered with SEC, FINRA, OCC, or multiple state regulators. If that describes your firm, we would like to show you how the platform handles your specific regulatory coverage profile.