How a $7.5B RIA Runs Firmwide Compliance

About JMG Financial Group

JMG Financial Group is a fee-only, fiduciary RIA headquartered in Downers Grove, Illinois. Founded in 1984, the firm manages $7.5 billion across more than 7,000 accounts from four offices in four states, serves over 1,500 financial planning clients, and prepares taxes for many of their clients every year. With more than 100 employees, JMG has spent four decades honing an integrated operating model, combining investment management, financial planning, and tax planning under one roof.

The Challenge

A growing firm with a static system

When Adam Boyer joined JMG as COO and CCO in July 2024, the firm ran on a legacy, proprietary compliance system built around paper processes. Employees signed forms manually, hundreds of pages were printed monthly, and core compliance workflows lived in shared folders, email chains, and spreadsheets.

JMG relied on a legacy provider for eComms archiving and review, but found the system “created a lot of volume that wasn't really meaningful for us.” As a result, their compliance team spent more time remediating noise than doing actual compliance work. 

Adam knew JMG needed a fix for their paper-based compliance program, something that could keep up with the regulatory landscape and speed of business. He had seen what modern infrastructure can do for visibility and efficiency at other top firms, telling us, “I understood the capabilities. And I was like, why are we doing it this way?"

The Solution

One platform to replace the patchwork

JMG replaced a fragmented mix of systems and manual processes with Greenboard, a single platform to centralize compliance workflows, supervision, and review. Today, one login gives JMG's compliance team access to employee compliance, firm compliance, communications supervision, and marketing review, with full visibility across each.

"The unified functionality capability was key to me," said Adam, "and getting a platform that cut across all the key areas of the business and provided ease of use for the employees and easy supervision for us." 

Digitizing the way JMG runs firm & employee compliance

On the employee side, Greenboard connected to JMG's custodial and employee brokerage feeds automatically, mitigating both migration costs and significant manual work dealing with paper statements.

The firm centralizes employee-facing compliance, like attestations, code of ethics workflows, policy sign-offs, and annual acknowledgments in Greenboard. New hire onboarding used to mean hours of in-person meetings and chasing paperwork, but now runs through the same platform as the rest of compliance.

"We're finding more and more ways to move paper and information digitally across the organization," Adam noted, and Greenboard helps make that possible.

On the firm compliance side, JMG builds directly in the system, creating custom workflows to consolidate processes that used to live across shared folders and email.

Take monthly fee testing: the team used to compile hundreds of pieces of paper and obtain a physical signature for manual review. Now, digital documents are submitted through Greenboard and automatically routed through a built-in review workflow.

Smarter eComms review, fewer false flags

“Compared to our old provider, there's solid time savings in those eComms reviews week over week. We don't get nearly as many because there aren't as many false flags,” according to Adam. Before the switch, JMG’s compliance team spent hours sifting through keyword-triggered alerts across email, texts, and Teams communications, but Greenboard's contextual AI changed the game: Instead of flagging every message containing "guarantee,” the system reads, analyzes, and contextualizes conversations, filtering and surfacing high-risk alerts.

"That saves us a lot of time and puts our attention in the right places," Adam confirmed. 

Marketing compliance on autopilot

Before Greenboard, marketing compliance review at JMG “was all people,” Adam noted, with no AI assistance, no automated SEC cross-referencing, and no disclosure tracking. 

Today, JMG runs monthly newsletters, investment commentary, and advisor-facing materials through Greenboard's AI-powered marketing review. The tool pulls directly from SEC regulations, automatically flagging unbalanced statements, identifying missing disclosures, and surfacing potential compliance issues before content goes out the door. 

Adam called it "phenomenal" and "probably one of the more used functions and capabilities for us."

He described review as a collaboration between his own judgment and AI analysis: Adam checks what the system has flagged, evaluates risk level, and then focuses his own review on tone and messaging. If the AI comes back clean, “that tells me very quickly that really I'm just looking for structure.”

The Impact

Same compliance team, dramatically more coverage

When Adam arrived at JMG, every compliance task — attestations, disclosures, and monitoring review — required manual effort. Hiring any employee meant more paperwork, more meetings, and more administrative overhead.

Today, Adam's onboarding instructions are simple: "Go to Greenboard, link it up, we'll see it. And it's that easy." Every employee and team is added to the same system without additional meetings, threads, or compliance work. 

"Greenboard becomes an easier way for us to continue to monitor, manage, and administer the compliance program in a way that's seamless and efficient," Adam said.

As he put it, compliance workload scales with employees, not AUM. Before, JMG’s headcount growth created additional operational burden, but on Greenboard, it’s scalable:

Built alongside compliance teams, designed for the whole firm

Greenboard is building with, for, and alongside our clients, and JMG is no exception. For Adam, that showed up during onboarding, when a standard implementation felt more like a partnership.

The Greenboard team helped support JMG's migration off legacy systems, connecting text monitoring, custodial feeds, and employee brokerage accounts across multiple vendors, and made sure data was flowing before go-live. "The team’s ability to work with us upfront and get everything connected so we were in a good spot from day one, that was really important," Adam said.

For JMG, service is key to the experience. When their team suggests a way to improve the platform, the Greenboard team responds quickly, sometimes shipping updates within the hour. “Those things are meaningful,” Adam noted. 

It's a simple model: collaborate closely, ship quickly, and let the product speak for itself. “You're not going to get that at the other big shops.”  For Adam, it comes down to shared priorities. "The philosophies align, and that's where you get the right synergies. A platform is a platform, but service makes the difference."

This collaboration is a big part of why JMG runs firmwide compliance on Greenboard. 

"It's kind of an absurd thing to say,” Adam acknowledged, “but I've gotten the most positive feedback out of standing up this compliance platform than anything else I've done in a very long time.”

Looking Ahead

Compliance that scales, culture that sticks

When Adam Boyer started at JMG in July 2024, compliance ran on a homegrown system, with team resources drained on false positives and stacks of paper processes. That infrastructure is now ahead of JMG, not behind it.

As the regulatory landscape evolves and the pace of business accelerates, JMG's compliance infrastructure scales alongside. "Greenboard will make it easier for us to keep up [with regulatory guidelines] and will continue to make it easier to support as the platform evolves," Adam said. Instead of retrofitting processes every time a new requirement is announced, JMG’s system is designed to absorb them, strengthening the firm's compliance position over time.

With firmwide adoption, compliance at JMG is no longer something advisors work around, but something everyone actively participates in.