On Monday, Smarsh launched the next generation of its Communications Intelligence Platform, which is built for firms in regulated industries and meant to provide for all their electronic communications capture, archiving and oversight needs.
It has been a busy few weeks for the company, having announced the week before its acquisition of the Digital Safe archiving and risk management product line from the large multinational software firm Micro Focus for $375 million. That deal is expected to close, pending regulatory approval, in the first quarter of 2022.
A mere two days prior, on Nov. 1, Smarsh cybersecurity subsidiary Entreda announced its acquisition of Privva, a cyber-risk assessment firm (terms of this deal were not disclosed). Entreda itself was acquired in May 2020.
Communications Intelligence Platform
With Smarsh’s new artificial intelligence–powered and cloud-based platform, financial services firms and those in other highly regulated enterprises can analyze communications data at scale, looking for risks as well as more quickly surfacing business insight.
The platform provides for capture and archiving support across more than 80 communications channels, including email, workstream collaboration platforms (like Microsoft Teams), mobile, social and audio.
Financial services firms are required to capture and review larger volumes of electronic communications and data than ever before to meet their regulatory retention and oversight obligations.
With the acquisition of pioneering artificial intelligence technology firm Digital Reasoning a year ago, Smarsh has been able to build its own in-house natural language processing and machine learning technology into the platform, allowing it to analyze both written and spoken communications data.
As the statement announcing the rollout noted, the new generation of the platform is now equipped to surface the signals, including the “compliance and brand risks, costly operational errors, security threats, real-time cultural indicators and untapped revenue opportunities” in a firm’s communications.
“Legacy email archiving and surveillance solutions simply weren’t built to handle the petabyte scale of disparate data created by organizations today,” said Smarsh Chief Product Officer Goutam Nadella, in the statement.
Smarsh has been a major company within the financial communications compliance space for over a decade, having acquired several firms over that period, including other leading vendors in the social media and compliance fields. It currently supports more than 6,500 customer firms. In addition to its many wealth management customers, the firm works with all the top 10 banks in the United States and many others around the world.
