Top 5 Considerations on How to Archive Text Messages
Regulators like FINRA and the SEC have long scrutinized unauthorized communications by financial advisers. It seems like every few months, we cover eye-popping fines when an adviser or investment banking institution fails to monitor the use of mobile texting apps when conducting business.
While firms can reference plenty of regulatory language requiring the capture and supervision of business records, how to archive text messages isn’t always clear — especially how to do so without overburdening IT or compliance teams.
Simply prohibiting text messages or mobile apps isn’t a practical strategy for a thriving financial services organization. Not only does that mindset limit your firm’s ability to compete in today’s business world, but a prohibition policy will not save you from fines if advisers are communicating with clients over text anyway.
Best practices on how to archive text messages
If your firm is wondering how to archive text messages effectively and with as little regulatory risk as possible, consider five key practices:
1. Actively develop mobile device governance
All stakeholders and employees must review existing texting policies. Having this discussion can reveal if policies that protect the business are empowering employees – or hindering their productivity.
2. Stay on top of text capture requirements
Policies should be updated to reflect changes to the firm and to regulations. Policies and practices should also regularly evolve to cover all the new ways reps communicate with clients.
3. Capture text content the right way
It’s vital that organizations capture text communications in their native form, complete with full context and metadata. Capturing text-based content, including its unique metadata, emojis and GIFs, enables firms to adhere to regulatory guidance on digital communications more effectively.
4. Proactively define supervision protocols
Communications supervision isn’t just an ongoing requirement for regulated users involved in the marketing or sales of financial products. Supervision practices can also be used to inspect how business data and information are being shared across different texts and other channels. Businesses should learn about employee messages that violate corporate policies long before an investigation occurs. In general, proactive inspection of messages, including the use of prohibited apps, can help refine protocols and reduce compliance risks.
5. Train and retrain employees
Ensure all employees are trained and aware of all policy guidelines and permitted communication channels. Obtain regular attestations from employees at the commencement of employment and regularly after that. Additionally, your firm should ensure policy guidelines and permitted communication channels are clearly communicated to employees.
Partner with an innovative archiving provider
Once your firm has a mobile compliance strategy in place, it’s important to engage with a text archiving vendor that can meet your firm’s oversight requirements efficiently and effectively.
For example, if your firm operates in the U.S., this could mean working with an archiving provider that can capture text content directly from telecom providers — such as AT&T, Verizon and U.S. Cellular, to name a few.
Having the ability to capture all the message types (e.g., SMS, MMS, RCS) is essential to fully understanding sent and received communications. This applies regardless of whether your firm has corporate-owned or BYOD policies.
Taking these steps will help your firm advance its compliance program, supervisory systems and, ultimately, protect the business.
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Scalable for organizations of all sizes, the Smarsh platform provides customers with compliance built on confidence. It enables them to strategically future-proof as new communication channels are adopted, and to realize more insight and value from the data in their archive. Customers strengthen their compliance and e-discovery initiatives and benefit from the productive use of email, social media, mobile/text messaging, instant messaging and collaboration, web, and voice channels.
Smarsh serves a global client base that spans the top banks in North America and Europe, along with leading brokerage firms, insurers, and registered investment advisors. Smarsh also enables state and local government agencies to meet their public records and e-discovery requirements. For more information, visit www.smarsh.com.
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