As financial advisors increase their use of email, social media, texting and other forms of digital communication, the market for products to record and archive these conversations is growing as well.
On Wednesday, Smarsh released an update to its web archiving product that saves content from any point in time in an indexed and searchable form to make it easier to keep track of changes or document reviews. The company also released a new user interface to improve users' experience.
Stephen Marsh, CEO and founder of Smarsh, said the company's product has grown 90 percent year-over-year.
“More companies recognize that archiving web content – alongside email, social media, instant messaging, text messaging and video – is a critical component of a comprehensive information governance strategy,” Marsh said.
At the recent FTF Social Media and Compliance in Financial Services conference, social media risk-management company Socialware released Social Access Control, a new product for firms to implement and configure a set of access controls to enable or disable specific features on social networks. This allows both regulated and non-regulated employees to utilize sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn the way they would normally do so, but with guardrails to keep them out of trouble with their compliance department and regulators.
For example, some employees at a firm may not arequire as rigorous archiving or oversight, but leaving their social media access completely unmanaged could expose them inadvertently put a firm at risk from a legal, cybersecurity, or reputational standpoint.
“Social media offers incredible potential for firms to amplify their brand and serve customers, but there’s always the risk of negatively impacting your brand with a single bad tweet or inappropriate joke,” said Bruce Milne, Socialware’s executive vice president.
Too many companies react to social media by just switching off access to all employees, denying the firm opportunities for brand amplification, customer outreach, customer support or market research, according to Socialware.
By allowing firms to customize the social media oversight options for different groups of employees, Socialware said employees can feel empowered, trusted, confident and safe with social communication online, while executives can sleep easy knowing the activity is managed.
