LONDON, September 10, 2014 – Smarsh®, the leading provider of hosted archiving solutions for compliance and e-discovery, today announced the opening of a fully operational London-based entity.

The US-headquartered company, which has successfully delivered its industry-leading, cloud-based archiving solutions to global financial organisations including Aberdeen Asset Management and Standard Life Investments, is now well-positioned in the Square Mile to assist UK-based customers in meeting compliance obligations from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the European Supervisory Authorities (ESA) and other global regulatory agencies.

The FCA published its Guidance consultation “Social media & customer communications”₁ this past August. Provided to clarify and confirm the FCA’s supervision of financial promotions in social media, sections 2.23 and 2.24 remind firms of their responsibilities to both approve digital media communications and retain adequate records of communications.

The UK’s Social Media Charter₂, a group formed to help the financial services industry use social media like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook compliantly, cited that 71 percent of UK employees in financial services ignore their company’s social media policy. This illustrates a growing need for UK firms to manage the policy, training and enforcement responsibilities that come with institutional use of social media.
The cloud-based Smarsh Archiving Platform enables customers to meet regulatory obligations for the retention and oversight of electronic communications, offering a unified compliance and e-discovery workflow across email, social media, instant messaging, mobile messaging and web content.

“Smarsh sees the opening of an office in London as the next logical step for building on our existing portfolio of business and exploring the tremendous opportunity that exists in the rapidly evolving UK regulatory landscape,” said Daniel Klein, Director of Business Development leading the Smarsh UK operation. “We have spent the last 13 years helping firms meet the stringent recordkeeping and supervision obligations of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). We look forward to sharing our extensive experience to help regulated companies in the UK.”

With over a decade of experience in the financial services industry, Klein brings a deep working knowledge of global capital markets and has extensive experience in assisting regulated organisations. The Smarsh UK office is located in London’s Square Mile (Warnford Court, 29 Throgmorton Street, Suite 219, London EC2N 2AT) and will be recruiting sales and customer support engineers in the coming months.

About Smarsh
Smarsh® delivers cloud-based archiving solutions for the information-driven enterprise. Its centralized platform provides a unified compliance and e-discovery workflow across the entire range of digital communications, including email, public and enterprise social media, websites, instant messaging and mobile messaging. Founded in 2001, Smarsh helps more than 20,000 organizations meet regulatory compliance, e-discovery and record retention requirements. The company is headquartered in Portland, Ore. with offices in New York City, Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles and London.

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₁ FCA Guidance Consultation: Social media and customer communications. August 2014
₂ The Social Media Charter. 2014