Steven Meirink is the CEO of Wolters Kluwer Financial & Corporate Compliance (FCC), which provides lending, regulatory and investment compliance solutions to financial institutions and legal entity compliance solutions to corporations, small businesses, and law firms.  This portfolio of FCC solutions helps financial services and legal professionals maintain ongoing compliance requirements, allowing customers to make an impact for businesses and consumers in their communities.

Previously, Meirink had been the Executive Vice President & General Manager of Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions for the past 7 years, overseeing the P&L, operations, and growth strategy for the business unit. 

As a divisional CEO, what are your chief responsibilities at Wolters Kluwer?

Let me start with a little background on our organization. Wolters Kluwer is a 188-year-old company that began as a publisher and has since evolved into a global information services company focused on serving professionals through the delivery of innovative solutions. I am privileged to lead our Financial & Corporate Compliance division.  Our team focus is to help enable compliance with an ever-changing and growing range of regulatory and legal obligations, improve operational efficiencies, and help the professionals we serve achieve better business outcomes. Our legal services customers include corporations, small businesses, and law firms, while our financial services business supports banks, non-bank lenders, fintechs, credit unions, insurers and securities firms of all sizes.

Given the depth of complexity our customers face, I would say there are two essential aspects to my job: one is to draw out ideas—not only from our team, but also from the customers we serve—as sources for ideation and innovation in addressing those complexities. The other part of my job is to prioritize and allocate resources and talent as part of our mission to deliver expert solutions that will have a meaningful impact for our customers.

The secured lending industry is increasingly looking toward innovation to improve lending processes. Can you discuss how new technologies, like AI  and machine learning, are being applied to help mitigate compliance risks in asset-based lending?  

We continue to work closely with secured lenders to enhance their practices around underwriting decisioning in multiple ways, including our pending launch in early 2025 of an AI-powered solution that helps lenders streamline the associated processes of lien search and due diligence when onboarding borrowers. This tool analyzes Uniform Commercial Code search documents and delivers to lenders actionable intelligence reports in a timely, compliant manner.

Earlier this year we launched an AI-driven solution—supported by human expertise—that features an automated, structured data feed to capture the massive volume of regulatory content from all relevant U.S. state and federal regulatory agencies—including AI-enabled authoritative source libraries and updates. It monitors and tracks those regulatory changes, maps their applicability to the lender, and enables the implementation of the changes in a way that documents and helps lenders mitigate overall compliance risk.

We are finding great receptivity to these offerings in the market, evidence that these kinds of capabilities are helping secured lenders better manage risk and complex compliance challenges, as it also helps enhance the level of service that lenders can deliver to their end customers.

Digital technology continues to grow as part of secured lending practices. Where is digital lending having the biggest impact?

Digital lending is having a huge impact in many ways. One prominent area of focus centers around customer acquisition, service, and retention. Borrowers are increasingly demanding web and mobile friendly access to their financial services. Financial institutions are meeting that demand by deploying digital technology that streamlines account openings, account maintenance, and requests for new or additional services. Anytime, anywhere access, speed, intuitive screens, and security are the name of the game. Significant investments in customer portals are indicative of this trend.

The auto finance space is also driving the adoption of digital technology. New fintech entrants are accelerating the adoption of digital experiences for both lenders and borrowers. Increasingly, these new entrants, which operate on fully digital platforms, often to the exclusion of paper entirely, are driving fully digital eAsset origination and management end-to-end. Digitalization begins with the loan application and includes execution of closing documents, facilitates depositing of the contract into an electronic vault, and enables downstream monetization activities through the digital lending ecosystem.

These new entrants are digital from the ground up, so financial institutions that want to participate in this lending space must incorporate digital lending practices into their processes. Lenders are actively pursuing more automation and opportunities to integrate their processes, ideally onto a single platform.

Another part of the value chain with digitization centers on the enhanced monitoring capabilities of one’s vaulted assets that a digital loan provides, a capability that helps ensure your assets—and your rights to those assets—are protected. We continue to see increasing adoption of digital across lending segments as lenders embrace technologies that are speeding, securing and enhancing their lending processes, which is providing countless advantages to the industry and the end customers served.

Lenders have long been viewed as trusted advisors by their customers. How do you see their role evolving in today’s challenging lending environment?

Secured lenders play an important role in serving as trusted advisors to their customers across a range of disciplines.  This is an important dynamic that I do not see changing in today’s environment.  Rather, their expertise has become even more critical with the explosive growth of AI and the increasing adoption of digital tools that can streamline and enhance business processes, alongside challenges ranging from continued economic headwinds to transactional risks ranging from crypto security to identity fraud.

What are the key leadership principles that guide your approach to overseeing compliance in a highly regulated field?  

I mentioned my number one job is in drawing out ideas and helping create the conditions and culture in which those ideas can take root and, ultimately, lead to the development of innovative tools and resources to help customers meet the complex risk and compliance challenges they face today. Central to our efforts in creating a culture of innovation is having a laser-sharp focus on communication, as it helps foster dialogue and creativity among employees, partners, customers and other business stakeholders. Whether an idea ultimately aligns with the organization’s broader strategy or not, we ensure a constructive feedback loop for all ideas, as it’s essential to the success of our business and, ultimately, to our customers to encourage this constant level of conversation and discovery.

In your view, what are the most critical areas of focus for lenders who want to excel in compliance and risk management in the coming years?

At a very high level, I would say that adoption of a focused, talent management program within one’s risk and compliance group--along with a shift to a more proactive, intentional use of data-generated compliance intelligence across the business--will be difference makers for organizations wishing to optimize their efforts in coming years. Attracting, developing and retaining the next generation of compliance and risk talent will require a concerted shift in modernizing and further integrating the elements of data science, AI and advanced analytics into a lender’s broader compliance, risk and innovation ecosystem.

Tomorrow’s compliance and risk management professional will not only have requisite skills in the fundamentals of compliance and risk management, but will also be able to augment these qualifications with hands-on software, business, legal, and data science know-how. And lenders will need to focus on investing in, cultivating and retaining such people talent.

Leveraging the data-rich resources generated by your team’s work in managing fair lending requirements—such as represented by managing HMDA, recently modernized CRA requirements, and new small business lending data collection rule (Section 1071)—may help provide the impetus to shift your organization’s focus from passive use of data to a more proactive, real-time application of compliance intelligence through the application of AI and predictive analytics, which will help inform and shape your data story. I anticipate that those lenders who are best positioned to make strategic investments in AI and other advanced technologies will be able to better leverage that data and differentiate their capabilities from those of the competition.