Smarsh to acquire TeleMessage
Smarsh has entered into an agreement to acquire TeleMessage, a provider of mobile messaging and voice capture and archiving.
According to Smarsh, regulatory compliance for mobile devices has been a challenge for organizations. Many employees have both corporate and "bring your own" devices and use both business and consumer messaging apps to communicate with their colleagues and customers. Historically, firms had to engage a fragmented landscape of providers to adequately cover their risks. As a result, many companies simply had "gaps" in their compliance.
With this acquisition, Smarsh will combine mobile carrier partnerships in North America, EMEA, and Asia, and extend its ability to store and monitor employee communications on the latest consumer applications such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, Signal, and other popular Mobile IM apps.
“Highly regulated firms have always needed to capture and retain their digital communications for regulatory compliance, legal discovery, and to protect their brand,” said Goutam Nadella, chief product officer at Smarsh. “However, given the new hybrid workforce and how digitally connected everyone is, it’s more challenging than ever to monitor all the new voice and text channels. Simply put, firms everywhere are overwhelmed by all the new channels—like WhatsApp, WeChat and more effective coverage for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) models—that are necessary for business but pose real risks, because of their variety and the volume and velocity of the data they produce. One of the biggest areas of risk is mobile communications.”
The acquisition of TeleMessage will strengthen Smarsh capabilities in helping customers to meet their global regulatory compliance requirements within the SEC, FINRA, Dodd-Frank, MIFID, FCA, IIROC, and others.
“As in many other service industries, mobile communication is ubiquitous in the financial sector,” said Nadella. “Bankers and traders use mobile phones and mobile instant messaging apps, for client communications, for commercial negotiations, to get order confirmations, and to finalize transactions. Unlike email communications, there are significant gaps in how firms capture and monitor mobile communications, which means these companies cannot trace all transactions information exchanged and information delivered over mobile devices. And that means significant regulatory and reputational risk for those firms, especially for voice communications.”
For more information, go to www.smarsh.com.