Ethan Floyd is the chief product officer at RegEd, the market-leading provider of RegTech enterprise
software solutions. These solutions streamline critical regulatory compliance and regulatory change
management functions for broker-dealers, financial advisor firms, insurance carriers/brokers, banks,
and other financial services firms.
Ethan joined RegEd in 2003 and has moved into leadership positions across implementation,
operations, managed services, and product—giving him a uniquely holistic understanding of how regulatory technology must function across the full lifecycle of a customer’s business. Over his long tenure, Ethan has played a visible role in guiding RegEd through multiple phases of ownership and growth, including acquisitions by Stone River, then Falfurrias Capital, and most recently Gryphon Investors.
His continuity and leadership through these transitions have been pivotal in aligning strategy, integrating teams, modernizing the product portfolio, and maintaining the company’s strong client relationships throughout periods of rapid evolution and growth.
Prior to joining RegEd, Ethan began his career in technology as a program intern at the Center for
Entrepreneurial Development (CED) where he helped manage entrepreneurial programming for emerging technology and life sciences companies. He holds a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
1.) What is in your pockets?
My phone, which is basically glued to me. Also, my AirPods and a number of customer product ideas
that haven’t quite made their way to Jira, our issue and project-tracking software. I just got back from
one of our major conferences where I was able to network with some of our largest customers. In my
role, they never hold back anything that they want us to do or any features they’d like to see on our
platform.
2.) What exciting thing has happened recently to you or your organization?
RegEd is a B2B SaaS software provider offering compliance management solutions for the financial services industry. We largely serve broker dealers, investment advisor firms, insurance carriers, and insurance distributors. We have approximately 80% of the top 10 to 20 firms in each of those verticals as customers. These include many of the household names where you might purchase mutual funds or ETFs or where you might purchase your homeowner’s, car, or life insurance.
We have 17 different products that we provide to the financial services industry geared toward helping them maintain regulatory compliance. We make sure that their insurance agents are properly licensed, appointed, and trained. We do the same thing on the security side, which is extremely regulated through FINRA, the SEC, and other regulatory agencies. We build software that helps firms manage all of those rules and regulations.
We have been focused on making RegEd more scalable and able to accelerate our speed to market,
including investing heavily in AI-driven compliance to turn what used to be burdensome manual processes into intelligent automated workflows for our customers. We have also recently introduced “Eddie,” RegEd’s new virtual compliance assistant designed to personify the company’s current and future innovation in AI and automation.
It has been fun watching our customers embrace Eddie and submit all of their ideas for what they believe Eddie can do for them across their firms.
3.) What is your favorite coffee spot?
Heirloom Café & Restaurant is a hybrid coffee shop and restaurant in Downtown Raleigh that provides a great venue at which to meet for coffee or a meal. I go there often.
4.) What keeps you up at night?
Two things: ensuring that our products continue to deliver measurable value to our clients and
keeping up with the pace of change we’re seeing in both technology and regulation. In our world,
compliance is not optional—it is mission critical to the firms we serve. The bar for delivering value is
incredibly high, and customers rely on RegEd to keep them compliant, efficient, and audit-ready
every single day.
Our customers have very aggressive growth and operational targets. Every financial services firm we work with is looking to expand and add more financial advisors or insurance producers; or they are looking to acquire other firms, while also decreasing operational costs. Our customers expect RedEd to deliver continued ROI over time.
5.) What is your favorite restaurant or happy hour?
This is a tough question because my close friends and I are all big foodies. I often find myself at the Oak Steakhouse, Poole’s Diner, Whiskey Kitchen, or Centro in Downtown Raleigh.
6.) What is next for you or your organization?
Growth. RegEd has grown very quickly in recent years. We’ve had many private equity owners who have helped us strategically invest in RegEd, and we’re turning the corner and becoming a mid-market company.
We’re working very hard to prepare RegEd for the next phase of its growth journey. This next phase of growth looks like product expansion, primarily through inorganic growth via acquisitions using the amazing platform that we’ve built here at RegEd. It is the foundational platform for those product add-ons and serves both broker-dealers and investment advisors in the securities industry as well as insurance carriers and distributors in the insurance industry.
There is so much expansion opportunity in terms of types of products that would create value for our customers, where the data that we house today can be combined with additional products to unlock even more value—giving us and our customers a 1+1 = 3. The next big phase for RegEd is inorganic growth with our product portfolio.
