Smarsh, Inc. Unveils Revolutionary Virtual Compliance Officer

Portland, OR - April 16, 2007 - Smarsh, Inc., the financial industry’s most trusted managed service provider of innovative, high-performance and reliable email archiving and messaging compliance solutions, today announces the release of their widely anticipated and revolutionary Virtual Compliance Officer (VCO). This automated agent significantly reduces corporate risk and workload and saves firms time and money spent on reviewing emails by mimicking what compliance officers do on a regular basis.

Virtual Compliance Officer is the first supervisory instrument designed to assist companies with their email supervision tasks in every respect. The tool proves to be a time and moneysaving service by automating nearly any routine task that a real person can perform on their email archives by reviewing emails and taking an action, such as monitoring corporate content and flagging an email, or identifying problematic messages, creating a report of actions taken and forwarding to a CEO.

“Rather than do a basic search for a set list of keywords and phrases across the board, with Smarsh’s VCO, I can set rules that best fit our firm and supervisory procedures,” says Stephen J. Myott, CFA, Managing Director, Thomas Capital Group. “I have essentially eliminated the need to review emails I don’t really care about and the best part is I can get automated reports that alert me to the most potentially high risk ones. I honestly can see how this will cut the time I spend reviewing emails in half.”

After surveying thousands of compliance officers in the financial services industry, product managers at Smarsh have found that both small and large firms have similar challenges and frustrations when it comes to reviewing messages. Some of the more common difficulties that firms encounter include:

•   Too many messages to review/time-consumed, based on false-positive (inaccurately flagged) messages
•   No way to prevent legal disclaimers from flagging emails
•   No way to exclude internal messages
•   No way to restrict scanning to certain individuals
•   No way to weight some keyword violations more than others

VCO can be configured to perform just about any action on an email that a human might take upon a detailed visual inspection, including:

•    Monitor incoming or outgoing emails for files or attachments they contain (ex. CompanySalesReport.xls) to protect corporate knowledge
•    Scrutinize high-risk users more than low-risk users
•    Assign point scores (weightings) to emails based on the number or severity of keyword/phrase violations they contain
•    Automatically mark messages as attorney-client privileged or compliant/non-compliant based on sender
•    Use multiple keywords lists, such as registered reps being scanned for different words then human resources might use for administrators

After setting up rules and actions to take on those rules, users can go one step further and even prioritize these rules to scrutinize and act on certain policies relative to one another. Score can be used to identify a firm’s highest risk (worst, most offensive) messages. In the same fashion that an assistant might show you detailed audit trails and reports on the worst emails of the day and what actions were taken on those violation emails, the VCO can proactively alert compliance officers of all of this on a regular schedule.

“Our Virtual Compliance Officer provides both small and large firms with the most effective solution available today to mitigate risk before problematic messages are uncovered at an undesirable time,” states Stephen Marsh, CEO, Smarsh, Inc.

For more information on how Smarsh’s comprehensive email compliance suite can effectively help investment advisors, broker dealers, banks, hedge funds and other financial organizations retain, retrieve and monitor their emails, please call 866-SMARSH-1 (866-762-7741) or email sales@smarsh.com.

About Smarsh Inc.

Founded in 2001, Smarsh, Inc. is the financial industry’s most trusted managed service provider of innovative, high-performance and reliable email archiving and messaging compliance solutions. More than 1,500 financial firms, including investment advisors, broker dealers, banks and hedge funds rely on Smarsh to be their industry-recognized Third Party Download Provider for mission critical communication tools to satisfy rules SEC 17a-4 and 204-2 and FINRA 3010 and 3110. For more information on Smarsh, please visit www.smarsh.com.

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