Communication Supervision Archives

All broker dealers have recordkeeping obligations required by Rule 17a-4(b)(4) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Among the list of required obligations is communication recordkeeping. This includes incoming as well as outgoing communications with respect to the broker dealer. Further instructions were given by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (“FINRA”) in FINRA 11-39 and later in FINRA 17-18. This is noted because over the course of the past years, the hybrid work environment has become the norm. With this, more and more communication software and applications have become available to the public to ease the transition between working from Read more about Communication Recordkeeping in the Day of the Hybrid Workforce[…]

An important component of financial compliance for broker-dealers is establishing message archiving for all communications relating to its business. Not only is it required by FINRA, but it can protect your Firm if there is an employee conducting unethical or illegal business activities. In a communication from Smarsh, a participant in FINRA’s Preferred Pricing Program, they state that “Broker-dealers can avoid being penalized by regulators for wrong doing among individual professionals if they can clearly demonstrate that they are proactively and sufficiently capturing and monitoring all electronic communications.”