Email Compliance

Email compliance is a fact of life for businesses today. Whether it is federal, state or corporate, most companies have to comply with some sort of compliance policy, regulation or law. They must also take steps to ensure that personnel are aware of the policies and take the proper steps to comply with them, including:

  • Automatically retain all emails and attachments
  • Monitor and review email and attachments for policy compliance
  • Index, search and audit email and attachments to respond to regulatory requests

Financial services organizations are required to review electronic advertising and client communications to ensure compliance with FINRA, SEC and SRO (self-regulatory organization) regulations, which includes emails and attachments. In addition, these firms’ compliance manuals must clearly outline their policies and procedures for meeting these requirements. In order to satisfy regulators’ expectations during an examination, it is critical to have a system in place and in line with the nature of your firm’s business and capabilities.
 
Traditional keyword scans frequently produce too many “false-positive” (inaccurately flagged) search results, creating more workload for compliance officers. Compliance departments inundated by the volume of email to review often waste valuable review effort while much greater risks, unethical behavior, investor complaints and unapproved advertisements remain uninspected or go unnoticed.
 
In addition, amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) require any company with the potential for litigation within the U.S. federal court system to preserve email and have the ability to produce it quickly when requested for legal discovery purposes. Organizations must know where their data is, how to retrieve it and how to meet data requests.