Top 10 Auditor Requests

FINRA, the SEC and many state regulators require financial services firms to maintain books and records of their communications. This includes all forms of electronic messaging—email, IM, cell phones, PDAs, Bloomberg, Reuters, etc. Printouts and backup tapes are not enough. Firms must have an archiving policy in place that ensures their data is securely stored in a tamper-proof, non-rewritable format. The data must be monitored and reviewed according to written guidelines, be easily accessible and searchable, and be backed up in multiple locations for disaster recovery. Additionally, these procedures must be clearly documented and tested annually.

LiveOffice AdvisorMail meets all financial services regulatory and legal requirements for email and IM archiving. We provide attestation letters documenting the services we provide to help you fulfill the capture, archive and retention rules.

FINRA, SEC and SRO regulations require firms to establish an adequate system for the retention of all records, including emails. It is important that all electronic correspondence and records be accurately maintained and accessible as required. Whether you have employees in your home office or representatives spread across the country, you are required to meet these regulations. In addition, certain regulations dictate that electronic communications need to be stored for at least five years on non-erasable storage media, and others mandate that securities firms retain and provide easy access to correspondence with their registered representatives.

LiveOffice AdvisorMail helps financial services firms of all sizes seamlessly archive, monitor, search and retrieve emails and IMs, including those of employees and registered reps working in remote locations. All data is archived and stored in one central location for quick-and-easy access whenever needed.

As part of the registration process, financial services firms are required to archive emails and IMs in a tamperproof format. In addition, some regulators have indicated that they also have the right to inspect any electronic record, including email, whether it is relevant to a trade or not.

LiveOffice AdvisorMail features tamper-proof WORM storage in multiple, geographically dispersed data centers for added security. This functionality also guarantees the authenticity of archived messages.

Several regulations, including SEC Rule 204-2 and SEC Rule 240.17a-4, state that financial services organizations must retain electronic communications with customers as well as other business-related communications for as long as seven years. These communications must be easily accessible, indexed and stored on non-erasable, non-rewriteable media.

LiveOffice AdvisorMail offers unlimited storage and retention for no additional charge—it’s included in your standard monthly fee. We can meet your organization’s retention requirements, no matter how long you need to store your data. In addition, attorney-client privileged and legal hold distinctions are available, so AdvisorMail clients can tag and set aside specific records for pending litigation as needed.

FINRA, SEC and SRO regulations include requirements for the proper storage of financial records and electronic communications. Some rules specifically require securities firms to create, review and maintain up-to-date written business continuity plans.

An important part of a business continuity plan is disaster recovery preparedness. Before a firm experiences a disaster, or even just a service interruption, it should have procedures in place to ensure it can still meet its existing obligations with customers. Experiencing a disaster or outage is not an excuse for failure to produce requested records during an audit.

LiveOffice AdvisorMail protects your data in multiple, geographically dispersed SAS-70 II Tier 4 compliant data centers. It provides real-time access to your data whenever you need it, and in the event of a disaster, duplicate data is available in another location, so your historical emails, attachments and IMs are never lost.

All financial services companies are required to review electronic advertising and client communications to ensure compliance with FINRA, SEC and SRO regulations. This includes email and attachments. In addition, your compliance manual must clearly outline your policies and procedures for meeting this requirement.

LiveOffice AdvisorMail features random sampling and comprehensive surveillance tools to help firms review electronic communications and advertising in order to meet this requirement.

If you are audited, having an archiving solution and compliance policies in place aren’t enough on their own. You must also be able to demonstrate how those systems and policies work.

LiveOffice AdvisorMail not only provides you with comprehensive, easy-to-use tools to streamline the monitoring and review process, but we also keep a full audit trail of all system usage. Plus, we provide a time and date stamped audit trail for all users, a random sampling feature and more.

Just implementing an archiving and compliance solution is not enough. FINRA, the SEC and many SROs also require firms to regularly and objectively test their policies and procedures to ensure they are working properly for their business. Your policies and procedures must also meet current regulatory standards. If there is a discrepancy in the system, it must be corrected or firms run the risk of receiving a deficiency or fine during an audit.

LiveOffice AdvisorMail is specifically designed to meet the most stringent financial services regulations. We provide hands-on training to ensure you are proficient with the solution, and our compliance experts are available to help you fine-tune it to meet your firm’s specific needs. In addition, we continually assess our own solution to ensure it meets current and future needs.

FINRA, SEC and SRO regulations apply to all types of electronic messaging, not just email. If you and/or your staff are using any form of IM (AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, etc.) or other messaging platforms (Bloomberg, Reuters, etc.) to communicate with clients and conduct business, you must have a way to archive and monitor those communications and have clearly defined written policies and procedures for doing so.

LiveOffice AdvisorMail, through its partnership with FaceTime Communications, seamlessly captures IMs (including Bloomberg and Reuters) sent and received via leading public and enterprise IM networks and securely stores them to meet compliance requirements. Our clients can monitor, search and retrieve these communications whenever necessary.

When FINRA, the SEC and SROs conduct audits, examiners often ask firms to produce data for specific users during a specific timeframe. Certain requests also call for keyword searches and require Boolean logic search capabilities. (By using a combination of AND, OR and NOT, Boolean logic allows you to construct more complicated search conditions.)

LiveOffice AdvisorMail offers its clients one central location for all of their archived data. It is quick and easy to search the archive anytime via a web-based user interface. Clients can view it online, download necessary information to a computer or disk, print it or have LiveOffice provide it on a DVD within your specified timeframe. Our compliance experts are readily available to assist you with these requests.