Both the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority(FINRA) have policies set up to ensure that the electronic communications of regulated companies are retained and archived in a way that is easily accessible during investigations and audits.
These regulatory mandates are so complex and ever-changing that many companies overlook the additional value that archiving mobile SMS brings forth in their business other than compliance. One of such often-ignored benefits of archiving mobile text messages is communication intelligence.
Archives of captured and recorded text, while unstructured in form, can provide regulated financial firms with troves of data that can uncover critical areas of a regulatory investigation. However, to harness this mountain of communication intelligence, companies must also leverage analytics in combination with a mobile archiving platform.
In this post, we will discuss how communication intelligence and analytics can enhance mobile archiving efforts of companies that are at high risk of facing audits and investigations by FINRA and SEC.
How Communications Intelligence Will Help in Investigations
Integrating analytics with text message archiving lets you better understand your communications data to get an accurate picture of the relationship between your employees, clients, and other key stakeholders of your business. The resulting output of such integration is called communication intelligence.
When gathered, communication intelligence can help determine the specific relationships in your text messages, helping in singling out suspicious people and questionable communications data for investigation.
Communication intelligence ultimately becomes like artificial intelligence in that it analyzes the specific relationships between your archived text messages, allowing you to separate suspicious communications data from ordinary texts that violate SEC’s and FINRA’s policies.
Analytics in Helping in Investigations
Many professionals in the financial sector also use analytics to analyze growing volumes of data, both structured and unstructured, to provide new revenue opportunities, more effective marketing strategies, better customer service, improved operational efficiency, and obtain competitive advantages over business rivals.
However, for compliance managers in the financial industry, communication analytics is a vital tool that can help give meaning to archived text messages in times of regulatory audits and investigations.
Robust communication analytics, along with a mobile archiving solution, can help streamline any investigation by allowing you to gather valuable insights from all the mobile messages sent and received within your business network – all even if your employees are using their personal mobile devices, or phones issued by your company.
This means that regardless of how reliant your workforce is to mobile texting; you can still pinpoint the people within your company that is potentially violating any SEC and FINRA regulatory standards.
A search feature is also available to single out the particular data point you need, which is proven helpful when searching for text messages with terms and keywords that potentially signal an insider trading or market manipulation.
SEC and FINRA investigators no longer need to check each record archived in a company to detect violators and could depend on analytics to identify all instances where suspects contacted someone in common through text messages. Archived text messages can accumulate over time until an individual investigator faces difficulty in making sense of the data, but data analytics address the difficulty through predictive analysis and spotting trends.
Other Areas of Investigation
Even if the government is not investigating your company, communication intelligence is still going to be needed for dealing with compliance. Aside from SEC and FINRA’s regulatory requirements, investigating text messages also applies to human resource investigations and eDiscovery requests as well.
To achieve accurate communication intelligence, a mobile archiving solution that can capture and record mobile SMS in real-time is warranted to prevent vital communications from accidentally being destroyed. Losing even one text message that happened to be essential to an investigation can delay the process and result in lengthier litigation.
The TeleMessage Mobile Archiver is a solution that helps financial firms archive mobile SMS and use those records for further analysis. We effectively address compliance, regulatory, eDiscovery response requirements, and reduces risk across a variety of the financial sector.
TeleMessage captures and records mobile content, including SMS, MMS, voice calls, social media, and WhatsApp Chats from corporate or BYOD mobile phones. Messages are securely and reliably retained within TeleMessage servers or forwarded to an archiving data storage vendor of your choice.
Our mobile archiving products securely capture content from mobile carriers and mobile devices for a variety of ownership models (BYOD, CYOD, and employer-issued). With our multiple archiving methods, you can always find the right tools or blend for your text message archiving and voice call recording requirements:
TeleMessage offers cross-carrier and international mobile text and calls archiving for Corporate and BYOD phones. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your organization stay compliant with SEC and FINRA text archiving regulations.
