Built From Experience on Both Sides of the Table
Meet Matt
Before founding Strategic Compliance Design, Matt Dunn spent his career seeing compliance from several different perspectives. He worked in brokerage operations before becoming an examiner with NASD and FINRA, then moved in-house, spending more than 15 years as a Chief Compliance Officer and working closely with advisory firm leadership, investment teams, operations professionals, and other parts of the business.
Over the course of that career, Matt has helped multiple advisory firms grow to more than $30 billion in assets under management, through organic growth and acquisition alike. He has supported compliance through more than 20 acquisitions, helped establish new RIAs and broker-dealers from the ground up, and guided firms through numerous regulatory examinations. That range, across formation, growth, and regulatory scrutiny, is what SCD is built on.
Over time, he saw the same problem repeatedly: plenty of consultants understood the regulations, but far fewer understood the business well enough to explain how those regulations should actually be applied. That gap became the foundation for SCD.
Why Does Strategic Compliance Design Exist?
After years of hiring and working with outside consultants himself, Matt knew what he wanted SCD to do differently. Clients should know who they're working with. Their consultant should understand their business before giving advice. The compliance program should be more than effective, it should be efficient. Leadership should be able to pick up the phone when something important comes up, and recommendations should account for what the firm is trying to accomplish, rather than simply pointing back to a rule.
That philosophy shapes the way SCD works today. The goal is to build a small number of deep client relationships rather than a large roster of firms receiving occasional support, and as SCD grows, that model will remain central to the business, with experienced consultants staying closely involved with every client.
Compliance Has to Work Inside a Real Business
An advisory firm does not exist to run a compliance program. It exists to serve clients, manage investments, employ talented people, and build a successful business. A strong compliance program supports those goals while protecting the firm and the people who depend on it. That requires understanding more than the rules themselves.
Matt's career has included responsibility across compliance, operations, supervision, risk, and leadership, and that broader experience allows SCD to look at a question from several angles and understand how a compliance decision may affect the rest of the organization. It also means knowing when the risk extends beyond a specific regulation: client disputes, insurance coverage, operational weaknesses, supervisory issues, and business decisions can all create exposure. SCD approaches compliance as part of the larger responsibility of helping leadership understand and manage those risks.
Experience That Goes Beyond Compliance
Matt is a CFA charterholder through the CFA Institute and earned his Executive MBA from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, building on a career already grounded in compliance, investments, operations, risk, and leadership. He holds the Certified Securities Compliance Professional (CSCP) designation from the National Society of Compliance Professionals, along with Series 7, 66, 24, 14, 53, 31, 79, 27 and 99 licenses, (inactive), and an Ohio Life and Health insurance license.
His experience as both a regulator and an in-house CCO adds another layer to that background. He understands what regulators expect, and because he's spent more than 15 years applying those expectations inside operating advisory firms, he also understands what it actually takes to make a compliance program work day to day. The credentials matter less on their own than for what sits behind them: years spent close to the decisions, people, and risks that shape an advisory business.