How Can Firms Avoid or Face Future SEC Sweeps?
The SEC, FINRA, and other international regulatory organizations have to control how companies monitor and record employee contacts. Therefore, regulatory bodies must review their impact and adapt their compliance criteria to reduce the risks associated with mobile compliance.
Organizations need a robust monitoring and archiving solution that enables them to archive business-related communications like using Verizon SMS archiving and other tools possible. Introducing solutions as technologies advance and new digital channels are launched.
Additionally, it suggests that regulated businesses must have a proactive compliance strategy to help them get ready for sweeps of regulated companies and maintain compliance with evolving legal requirements from legacy to modern digital communication technologies at hand.
Early-generation employee communication methods
Before the advent of current messaging applications, SMS, emails, and archaic chat apps was widely utilized for business interactions, employees are not permitted to use personal email accounts for business conversations, and SEC and FINRA mandate that firms monitor, record, and preserve email messages using accounts issued by firms—additionally, SEC and FINRA SMS archiving restrictions applied to older SMS and text messaging applications like Skype.
Recent and modern employee communication methods
In recent years, some social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, have developed into efficient tools for corporate cooperation. FINRA created the aforementioned record-keeping guidelines for social media platforms in response to the prospective requirement of communication compliance. However, personal social media usage is exempt from FINRA rules, emphasizing the significance of separating communication information relevant to private and commercial matters.
Then came the era of conducting business via secure mobile messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, WeChat, Signal, Telegram, and Snapchat. Companies that use these tools must archive voice calls and use several tools, like Verizon text archiving, per FINRA retention guidelines.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic started, the growth of modern remote collaboration applications like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Zoom has presented new difficulties for regulatory organizations. Because of this, firms must save some of the interactions on these platforms, according to FINRA’s advertising FAQs published in September 2021, to make their communication compliance well-aligned with the standard-keeping regulations implemented worldwide.
