Smarsh + Actiance: Extending the Lead, Through Innovation.

I had a very interesting customer conversation last week that helps lend some perspective on the recent news. This compliance officer was detailing the difficult position she was in as her firm looked at implementing a text message archiving strategy and technology solution.

She knew that texting is everywhere. Enabling her advisors to use text messaging to communicate with customers was a no-brainer. We all know that prohibiting texting is futile and likely presents more risk for the organization. Beyond that, this strategic shift was important for the business – it would give her advisors more tools to work with to communicate with customers and potential customers, through the means of their choice. In simple terms, it represented a major avenue to greater productivity.

At the same time, her number one priority is to protect her organization and its customers from risk. Regulatory scrutiny from FINRA and the SEC is growing more sophisticated and prescriptive. She was concerned about MiFID II. Would text content translate into a massive increase in workload for her team, just to manage the subsequent recordkeeping and oversight challenges? Would the cost of compliance outweigh the benefits?

Even beyond the financial services industry – in the public sector, where more and more local, state and Federal agencies are trying to find ways to meet their open records obligations with new and changing technology – we’re seeing these two competing realities. What wins out – productivity or compliance? For too long, one side has benefited at the expense of the other.

The days of “productivity OR compliance” are behind us. Smarsh, now together with Actiance, is better positioned than ever to offer customers productivity AND compliance.

Together, our combined company provides capture, archiving and supervision support for the most content types (100+) in the industry, across a broad range of electronic communications including email, social media, mobile text messaging, instant messaging/collaboration, encrypted chat and voice communications. Having these solutions to help satisfy their legal and regulatory obligations enables our customers to use Slack, text messaging, LinkedIn or whichever channel they need to grow their businesses.

We’re also seeing organizations struggling with the maintenance and performance of their legacy archiving and supervision technologies. Together, Smarsh and Actiance provide flexible deployment (cloud, dedicated, hybrid, on-premises) and data migration options, along with the industry’s top tools for efficient supervision.

We are incredibly excited about this combination with Actiance, a team that we have partnered with, respected and competed against for more than 15 years. Together, we are taking two complementary market leaders in the Enterprise Information Archiving space and creating one global market leader.

For Smarsh, the wind is at our backs. We have seen aggressive, sustained growth, enhanced by and driven through huge strides with recent acquisitions (MobileGuard and Cognia), traction in the public sector, market demand for our mobile text archiving offerings and support for new communication/collaboration platforms (i.e. Slack). In addition, we were recently named a Leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving for the third consecutive year, and are positioned furthest to the right for its completeness of vision.

Together, we can double-down on our 2016-2017 accomplishments. We will increase our investment in product development, grow and nurture our partner ecosystem and accelerate our global expansion. The integration will take time and needs to be done strategically, and we’ll organize in a way that provides the best of our combined capabilities to the benefit of our customers and partners.

Together, we are offering productivity AND compliance, and I am incredibly excited about what’s to come.

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Stephen Marsh

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