Top 3 Things to Consider for Your Next Archive
Once again, your firm’s archive is creating more work for you.
Maybe you’re on your firm’s compliance team, and you’re reviewing the fifth duplicate email flagged for review. (And like the four other duplicates before, this email checks out too.) Or maybe you’re in IT, and you’re forced to build a connector from scratch because your current archive can’t capture content after the most recent Zoom update.
Or maybe you’re an executive, and you and your team need to plan next year’s budget for fines when your archive inevitably fails to meet a regulatory exam.
An underperforming archive can be a resource black hole, both in terms of work hours and money. So, if your firm is looking for a new archive, what are some key considerations to ensure you maximize the ROI?
Why it matters
Data storage is necessary for a modern business. However, financial services firms need an archive that’s purposely designed to fit the regulatory demands of their industry. But not all archives are created equal. Keep these three things in mind when looking for your next archive.
1. Archive work with downstream processes
Archiving data is simple (and inexpensive) if you’re just holding it. But for those in the financial services industry, communications data needs to be searchable and accessible for supervision and compliance purposes.
Your firm needs an archive that's intentionally designed to support these processes by enabling applications to access and review the stored communications data. Seamless integration between the archive and supervision tools allows compliance teams to focus on reviews, and not combing through unindexed data.
E-discovery is also an important consideration for your next archive. Litigation is time-consuming and expensive, partly because many resources must be diverted from regular day-to-day work to focus on discovery.
An archive with powerful search and retrieval capabilities can produce relevant records faster and more accurately to fulfill discovery requests — and finding what you need when you need it saves time and resources.
2. Archive has innovative or automated ways to reduce data storage costs
Holding data costs money, and it’s just the nature of the industry that your firm must maintain proper books and records. But your firm doesn’t need to always access that data at the drop of a hat or even keep that data forever.
As time goes on, data is generally less likely to be needed for investigation, discovery, or surveillance. There are also some types of data (e.g., mass marketing emails with pre-approved content) that are infrequently accessed and less (or not) relevant in most searches.
Reducing the level of indexing for older and less critical data significantly reduces the size of the indexes needed, which reduces the cost of providing archive services.
Imagine that your firm has a compliance mandate of seven years and a governance mandate of 10 years. With a legacy archive, your firm will probably keep everything for the entire 10-year period, with no ability to delete anything until the retention period expires.
A flexible archive with a tiered data approach can shift your firm’s less time-sensitive data to warm storage (vs. hot storage), which can reduce data storage costs. Your data storage costs can be further reduced if your archive is able to automatically dispose of data at the end of its retention period. This eliminates the time (and need) to manually delete data.
3. The archive is prepared for future regulatory and technology changes
Interactions in the financial services sector have drastically changed since the turn of the millennium. Email started as the shiny new tech on the block, quickly became mainstream, and now it’s slowly stepping aside as mobile and encrypted apps make a strong case to be the more popular communication channels.
Likewise, regulations are reshaping firms’ supervisory practices. In just 25 years, firms went from wondering if email interactions with clients counted as records, to now knowing that they’ll have to capture the communications between human clients and AI-generated chatbot messages.
Your firm’s archive must be prepared for the trajectory of communication trends and technologies and how these changes affect regulatory decisions. This can include effectively managing the expanding volume of communication channels and ensuring compliance teams are able to maintain supervisory obligations without being overwhelmed.
What can a Smarsh archive do for your firm?
Smarsh has been offering archiving solutions to enable financial services firms to meet their books and records obligations for more than two decades. We understand your archive isn’t simply to store data. Your firm must be able to trust that your archive can enable:
- The capture of the wide variety of communications — in their native formats — your firm uses to conduct business
- Compliance workflows, such as reviewing archived communications for risk
- Zeroing in on true communications risk by reducing false positives
- Legal workflows, such as exporting data
- Data lifecycle management to reduce data storage costs
Smarsh Enterprise Archive covers the most stringent communications retention and immutability regulations, including FINRA, IIROC, FCA, MiFID II, and GDPR. It works seamlessly with the rest of the Enterprise Platform suite of solutions that includes:
- Comprehensive capture that supports 100+ channels and retains messages in the channel’s native format and context
- AI-powered supervision and surveillance capabilities that reduce false positives by up to 95%
- Fast and powerful discovery to simplify investigations and legal holds
Because of our comprehensive end-to-end platform, we're positioned furthest for overall Completeness of Vision in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Digital Communications Governance and Archiving Solutions report.
Our approach to our archive solutions means you’ll be able to maximize your archive’s ROI. We’ve done it for others, and we can do it for you.
“Before, it used to take weeks to put together and make sure we had the right data. Some of our bigger compliance investigations went from two, three, four weeks to really two, three, four days. With Smarsh we can push data back out and meet the legal obligations as quickly as possible.”
- Senior technical expert, financial services
“Smarsh has provided efficiency in our day-to-day process of surveilling and reviewing alerts or queues. It’s more streamlined, more efficient, and more consistent than our prior solution.”
- Chief compliance officer, financial services
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Scalable for organizations of all sizes, the Smarsh platform provides customers with compliance built on confidence. It enables them to strategically future-proof as new communication channels are adopted, and to realize more insight and value from the data in their archive. Customers strengthen their compliance and e-discovery initiatives and benefit from the productive use of email, social media, mobile/text messaging, instant messaging and collaboration, web, and voice channels.
Smarsh serves a global client base that spans the top banks in North America and Europe, along with leading brokerage firms, insurers, and registered investment advisors. Smarsh also enables state and local government agencies to meet their public records and e-discovery requirements. For more information, visit www.smarsh.com.
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