Liz Cope
Elizabeth Cope, the founder of SEC Compliance Solutions, began her career in the financial industry working at Ashland Partners & Company—a GIPS compliance and verification consulting firm. In 2005, Ashland Partners decided to create a new division, Ashland Compliance Group, to offer SEC compliance consulting in response to the new Compliance Program Rule. Liz volunteered to develop this service line. She locked herself in a conference room for two weeks, reading “Regulation of Investment Advisers,” a legal book by Lins and Lemke. She read the book from cover to cover and began to develop a system for planning, conducting, and documenting the annual review. She developed the first edition of the Annual Review Organizer that we use today to administer the annual review and streamlined her system across the firm’s clients. A constant curiosity for how things will work together combined with the gift of being able to fearlessly put an idea into hands-on action is Liz’s recipe for success and is the way by which she approaches all things in life and business. In 2010, Liz and four other Ashland Partners employees purchased Ashland Compliance Group and re-branded as Focus 1 Associates. In 2017, Liz spun off from Focus 1, along with colleagues Christene Sismondo and Katie Mogan, and founded SEC Compliance Solution, LLC with a vision of supporting the finance industry with integrity, accountability, and practicality.