Virtual Compliance Officer®

Improve the Efficiency & Effectiveness of Message Review

A tough reality of message compliance is that many firms don’t have an efficient and reliable way to perform employee message surveillance. The traditional simple keyword scan frequently produces a lot of “false-positive” (inaccurately flagged) search results, creating more workload for the compliance officer. Compliance departments inundated by the volume of electronic messages to review will often waste valuable review effort while much greater risks, unethical behavior, investor complaints, and unapproved advertisements remain uninspected or go unnoticed.

False-positives are only one of the challenges that large and small firms endure while reviewing messages. Other common frustrations include:

• Too many messages to review
• Too much time wasted reviewing the “wrong messages”
• Too much time consumed performing routine tasks
• In the case of email, no way to prevent legal disclaimers from being flagged
• No way to restrict scanning to certain individuals
• No way to weight some keyword violations more than others

But there is a better way. The Smarsh Virtual Compliance Officer® (VCO) is the first automated agent designed to assist companies with their electronic message supervision tasks. It integrates with the Smarsh hosted message archiving platform and is a time and money-saving service that automates many of the routine tasks that a “real” person performs while reviewing organizational messages. The policy-driven supervision engine was designed to enable more effective and efficient message review, and to help compliance departments identify “real” risk.  

Think about the VCO as a army of reviewers at your firm's disposal, tasked with searching through all company messages and taking action based on specific and customized policies. Since the VCO was first introduced, it has become one of the most sought after features in our suite of services and is truly unique offering in the market.

Sample Applications

The Smarsh system is setup to avoid the pitfalls of a cumbersome review process and to help uncover true compliance issues. The proprietary VCO allows clients to facilitate and automate their surveillance process via a flexible and customizable rules-based system. The goal of the VCO is to ensure an efficient and consistent compliance process by eliminating all but pertinent messages from the surveillance process, while concurrently mitigating risk within the firm. Sample applications include:

• Automatically marking system administrator messages as compliant/reviewed
• Identifying high-risk users, scrutinize heightened supervision employees
• Automatically flagging customer complaints for easy audit reporting
• Assigning point scores (weightings) to messages based on the number and severity of policy violations
• Utilizing multiple keywords lists to apply to different groups of employees within a firm. Keyword lists can be based on employee job function, department, severity of keyword violation, HR purposes, etc.
• Monitoring incoming or outgoing emails for specific files or attachments (content and/or attachment types)
• Assigning messages to specific reviewers
• Automatically escalating high-risk employee messages to supervisors
• Generating automated reports to track activity
• Automatically marking messages as “Attorney-Client Privileged”
• Automatically marking messages as “Advertisements”
• Excluding legal disclaimers from keyword (phrase) scans, eliminating false positives
• Filtering out email blasts from specific senders, eliminating false positives
• Applying custom tags, legal holds, or granular retention policies (as needed)
• Generating reports directly to your inbox featuring your organization’s highest-risk messages
• Scheduling the system to proactively email VCO rule violations to compliance reviewer(s) on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis