• Tweet
• Share
• Email

• Tweet
• Share
• Email

Maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements is one of the major obstacles that Investment Managers, Brokers and Financial Advisors are facing before jumping into social media. If you haven’t heard your Legal & Compliance department say they don’t have the people necessary to monitor all of the firm’s social media, then consider yourself lucky!

On the other hand, if your firm is struggling with determining how they can go about applying regulations such as FINRA’s 10-06 notice for social media, there might just be some third party technology solutions that can help.

Background:

One of the main objectives of FINRA’s 10-06 notice requires firms to effectively and appropriately supervise their representatives’ social media use. The regulatory notice is very clear that every firm is required to retain communications made through social media sites. Additionally, at the time FINRA’s notice was published in January 2010, FINRA even mentioned being aware of some technology providers that offer solutions to deal with large variety of social media compliance challenges such as:

• Supervision
• Suitability
• Blogging
• Twitter
• Static and interactive content
• Entanglement and third-party content
• etc…

Available Solutions:

As an industry, we are lucky that none of the technology tools needed to be in regulatory compliance have to be custom-built in house. Instead we can now turn to a variety of third party technology providers. The key solution providers are summarized below:

• Basic ability to retain social media communications: Enables firms to meet the basic retention requirements as required by Rules 17a-3 and 17a-4 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and NASD Rules 3110:
  • Archiving applications include services from Backupify (http://www.backupify.com, a Social Media backup service is available)




• End-to-end social media compliance solutions: End-to-end compliance solutions enable firms to do everything from automatically enforce corporate policies, approve/reject social media messages, determine enabled features on social networking sites, all while  providing a level of powerful storage, archiving and supervision tools:
  • Socialware offers a software product called Risk Manager that enforces social media access restrictions based on user-level permissions, quarantines message that may violate company policies, and routes messages for review and approval prior to their public posting.

  
  

  • Facetime utilizes a hardware based solution called the Unified Security Gateway (‘USG’) that connects to multiple types of network configurations. Facetime’s USG equipment provides the ability to control features and content on social network in addition to  moderating, monitoring and logging content and setting group and user levels policy configurations.

  
  

  • Smarsh (integrated with Socialware): integrated Socialware’s policy enforcement, capture, moderation and analytics capabilities for social media networking sites, with the archiving and compliance functionality from Smarsh. Powered by Socialware’s Compass solution, the new integrated offering includes the preservation, supervision and policy controls that enable financial services firms to operate in compliance with SEC and FINRA regulations.

  
  

  • Autonomy’s Social Media Governance: provides aggregation across news feeds, blogs, and social media sites to monitor social media content from employees logged in through company networks, as well as discussion from users operating outside company networks. Also includes functionality for conceptual search, archiving, escalation and workflow management, executive dashboards.

  
  

  • Arkovi Enterprise Editon: offers the ability to archive, search, filter across Twitter, blogs & other social media sites via RSS. Social media content can be exported to other enterprise systems. Appears to have the most limited management and workflow capabilities of the providers listed, but it could be appropriate based on the size of the firm in question.

Stop by the sites listed above and let me know what you think of their solutions.

Has your firm looked into any of the third party technology providers mentioned?
Are there other major providers not listed?

Disclaimer: None of the third party technology providers mentioned in this article provided any means of compensation. Review of these providers in no way constitutes any form of professional or personal endorsement.