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Unique Conditions of Cannabis Track and Trace

08.18.2022

The requirement to track products across the supply chain from seed to final sale exists in highly regulated industries such as food, pharmaceutical, alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis. Track and Trace systems aim to achieve two main objectives:

  1. Protect consumer health and safety with the ability to recall products.
  2. To comply with rules and regulations and provide transparency of transactions across the supply chain.

Different track and trace systems are developed for each industry’s unique requirements. However, the main difference in the cannabis industry from the other industries is the lack of consistent regulations across legal markets. Each state can create its own rules for tracking products.

This variability has increased the complexity of monitoring the rules and regulations developed by each state. Additionally, there is a lack of traditional technology companies willing to serve a federally illegal industry, resulting in a lack of technical industry standards.

These unique conditions have resulted in billions of transactions being recorded in various track and trace systems, making it challenging to achieve one of the primary goals associated with implementing a cannabis track and trace system – monitoring the cannabis supply chain for compliance.

There are two primary benefits to regulating the emerging legal cannabis industry.  The first is allowing government agencies to create new regulatory concepts and frameworks to meet state-level requirements with modern ideas. The second area of success lies in using new technologies such as advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning for automating the analysis of these transactions to rapidly find and alert where a condition of compliance is at risk with intelligent insights to augment compliance teams. 

About the Author Mark Nassi

Mark Nassi is the Co-Founder and Chief Financial Officer of NCS Analytics, where he leads the company’s financial strategy, data ingestion infrastructure, and custom analytics operations. Serving as the technical and financial backbone of the organization, Mark specializes in translating complex data architecture into clear, actionable intelligence that solves high-stakes operational and regulatory challenges for clients nationwide.

At NCS Analytics, Mark plays a pivotal role bridging the gap between enterprise software engineering and commercial financial execution. He oversees the data pipelines responsible for processing millions of weekly regulatory records, ensuring the platform’s underlying financial and behavioral models operate with absolute accuracy. His cross-functional oversight ensures that custom client requests, complex data ingestions, and risk-scoring algorithms maintain the highest standards of mathematical integrity and regulatory compliance.

Recognizing the unique compliance hurdles faced by institutions in cash-intensive industries, Mark co-architected the company’s core financial logic models, including the patent-pending analytics that power the NCS Platform and NCS Thea. By converting fragmented, government-mandated filings into structured financial metrics, his work enables credit committees, BSA/AML compliance officers, and enforcement agencies to independently verify risk and evaluate business viability with confidence.

He began his career developing specialized market research data analytics and collection software before advancing into accounting, where he focused on technology platforms and alternative investment structures.

Mark holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the University of California, Davis, and a Master of Science in Accounting from the University of Colorado Denver. He is an active Certified Public Accountant (CPA) in the state of Colorado, leveraging his combined expertise in advanced mathematics and accounting to drive continuous innovation across NCS Analytics’ data platforms.

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