Updated:
StarCompliance
StarCompliance, led by CEO Jennifer Sun since 2024, provides employee conduct and trading surveillance software to over 1,000 financial institutions...
StarCompliance
StarCompliance was founded in 1999 in Rockville, Maryland, and spent the subsequent two decades building employee compliance software for the financial services industry. The firm originally focused on personal trading and code-of-ethics monitoring for broker-dealers, before expanding into a multi-tenant platform serving asset managers, hedge funds, and pension funds. Founder Marc Epstein incubated the business as a response to the post-dot-com regulatory wave, enshrining insider trading detection and employee conduct tracking as the firm's core competency. Today the platform automates personal trade surveillance, gifts and entertainment tracking, political contribution monitoring, and employee attestation workflows. Typical deployments span tens of thousands of employees across buy-side and sell-side institutions; the client list includes asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, and public pension plans operating under SEC, FCA, and ESMA regimes. StarCompliance does not disclose its revenue, but its headcount exceeding 300 professionals and a client base of roughly 1,000 institutions places it among the largest independent RegTech providers globally. Additional offices in York, United Kingdom, and San Francisco support a user base concentrated in North America and Europe. The company restructured its leadership in 2024, appointing former Bellese CEO Jennifer Sun to replace longtime chief executive Marc Epstein. That transition followed the 2021 acquisition of StarCompliance by private equity firm Astorg, which acquired a majority stake from previous backer Luminate Capital. The firm added a political contribution and pay-to-play module in 2023, expanding its addressable market to registered investment advisers facing heightened SEC scrutiny under the Marketing Rule (per the firm's official communications, 2023). StarCompliance operates a growing two-sided network: it aggregates anonymized employee trading patterns while giving compliance officers a single dashboard for surveillance across multiple jurisdictions. That architecture means every new client makes the benchmark data set more valuable for existing clients — a structural advantage that pure software vendors without network scale cannot replicate. The firm now competes against legacy providers like FIS and MyComplianceOffice, but its standalone focus on conduct risk has kept it free of the modular bundling that dilutes point-solution depth at diversified fintech platforms.
General information
Firm type
Asset Manager
Year founded
1999
AUM
Undisclosed
Location
Region
North America
Country
United States
City
Rockville
Corporate office
Rockville, MD, United States
Additional offices
York, United Kingdom · San Francisco, CA
Principals
Jennifer Sun
CEO
Mark Korb
Chief Technology Officer
Sector focus
Frequently asked questions
Who runs investment decisions at StarCompliance?
StarCompliance is a software company, not an investment firm. It does not manage capital or make investment decisions. Jennifer Sun has led the company as CEO since January 2024, succeeding founder Marc Epstein, who remains Chairman (per StarCompliance press release, 2024). Ownership sits with private equity firm Astorg, which acquired a majority stake in 2021.
What does StarCompliance's platform actually do for institutional allocators?
The platform automates employee personal trade surveillance, political contribution tracking, gifts and entertainment logging, and annual code-of-ethics attestations. For pension funds, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds running internal trading desks, StarCompliance monitors whether portfolio managers or analysts are front-running the fund's own trades or trading on material non-public information. The software sits between the HR system and the broker-dealer feed, flagging potential conflicts before a trade settles.
Does StarCompliance service family offices or smaller allocators?
StarCompliance primarily targets institutions with 500-plus covered employees — asset managers, large RIAs, pension systems, and sovereign funds. The firm does offer a scaled-down solution for smaller firms, but its core economics rely on large, multi-jurisdictional deployments. Family offices running a lean staff of 5–15 investment professionals typically use simpler disclosure tools unless they face stringent regulatory obligations from an associated trust company or SEC registration.
How does StarCompliance source and retain enterprise clients?
The firm sells through a direct enterprise sales force specializing in chief compliance officers and general counsel at regulated financial institutions. Implementation cycles run four to nine months due to integration with internal HR systems, broker feeds, and single sign-on architecture. Once embedded, switching costs rise substantially because StarCompliance holds years of employee trade history, disclosure records, and audit trails that a successor system would need to reconstruct from scratch.
Is StarCompliance a public company or privately held?
StarCompliance is privately held. European private equity firm Astorg acquired a majority stake from previous sponsor Luminate Capital in 2021. The company has not filed for an IPO and has historically funded operations through private equity backing rather than public markets.
What regulatory regimes does StarCompliance cover?
The platform supports SEC Rule 204A-1 (code of ethics), CFTC Rule 23.604, FCA conduct rules, ESMA MiFID II employee trading provisions, and a growing set of pay-to-play regulations including SEC Rule 206(4)-5. The firm added a dedicated political contribution module in 2023 that maps state and federal pay-to-play thresholds by jurisdiction (per the firm's official communications, 2023).
Who are StarCompliance's main competitors?
The employee compliance software market includes point competitors MyComplianceOffice and ComplySci, alongside broader governance platforms from FIS (Protegent) and Diligent that bundle employee trading modules with board portals and entity management. StarCompliance competes on depth: its only product is conduct and trade surveillance, whereas larger competitors treat the module as a cross-sell to an existing GRC suite.
Profile maintained by Altss using OSINT (open-source intelligence), regulatory filings, licensed data partners, and verified direct submissions. Read the methodology. Last updated: . Continuous refresh with full update cycles at least every 30 days.
Need institutional-grade insight on family offices?
Altss delivers:
Prefer a guided tour?
We’ll walk you through: