Streamline Compliance Initiatives Seamlessly

As the regulatory environment continues to change faster than ever, elevated business complexity and focus on accountability have led enterprises to step up their compliance initiatives across the organization. Compliance teams are monitoring corporate activities and attempting to find legal, HR, or regulatory issues before they become either an external enforcement matter or a legal action against the organization. To do that, departments are implementing creative and proactive approaches to anticipate potential risks or problem areas. At a time when risks are interdependent, and controls are shared, these initiatives are often unorganized and uncoordinated in the wake of departmental silos. Organizations need to go beyond this silo mentality and break down these barriers to communicate a unified vision for driving compliance audits, internal investigations, and regulatory investigations.

Even though an organization may have collected the right information for compliance regulations, in many cases, legal departments want to re-collect content to bring into their eDiscovery system. To justify the re-collection, legal departments may claim the metadata associated with the compliance archive is not sufficient or lacks an effective ‘chain of custody’ from the information in the archive. Often a discussion between compliance, legal, and IT teams during the development of the archive system will find solutions for these issues and greatly simplify and reduce the cost of eDiscovery collection. In order to streamline compliance efforts, companies require the right content management and e-communications system in place to enable easier to access information quickly through their data collection and monitoring tools.

Enter 17a-4 LLC. An NY-based legal and compliance consulting company, 17a-4 specializes in compliance software and services with a sharp focus on e-messaging and archive technologies that meet the regulatory and eDiscovery requirements of institutional clients. The company assists organizations in ensuring their information infrastructure is in compliance and adheres to SEC, FINRA, and CFTC rules and regulations. 17a-4 bridges compliance, legal and IT teams with its comprehensive compliance solutions and services, guiding them to adopt best practices in the way they archive regulated content—including email, instant messaging, data streams, trading platforms, websites, social media and databases—and help create effective retention, review, supervision and disposition policies. “We help organizations what we call ‘defensibility’ in litigation against a regulator or any opposing party. Something as trivial as missing emails or duplicate data from an archive can undermine your credibility in the court because you do not have the information you need. We follow a methodology to bring legal, compliance, and IT teams together so that there is a plan in place, enabling the IT team to capture the content and the legal team to produce the content if called upon,” says Charles Weeden, managing partner, 17a-4, LLC.

Unlike most of the players in the market, 17a-4 empowers its clients to respond quickly and cost-effectively to their compliance or legal matters. In doing so, as a part of its legal and compliance services, 17a-4 looks at the types of messaging and collaboration content that the clients use, and ensures that all of it is archived making easy for any compliance or legal officer to find the required content related to a particular investigation. Post identifying the platforms—be it Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, and more—allowed for the client to use for conducting business, 17a-4’s gamified approach aims at the process of capturing the content. Meanwhile, the company also ensures that the client knows in and out about the hyper metadata content being captured as a part of the archiving process. The end product is a master document applying to all types of compliance content. 17a-4 also helps the client decide on the select group of management that can capture, change, or access this master document.

From the software standpoint, 17a-4 has devised DataParser—an on-premise middleware solution for messaging compliance—for clients who lack the appropriate tools to capture content. DataParser captures and formats content from both the compliance and collaboration platforms, such as Bloomberg, Cisco Jabber, SharePoint, and more, and also formats and manages the data ingestion into an email archive, Exchange or Office 365. With a modular design that supports and collects various forms of regulated content for compliance with SEC and FINRA rules, DataParser has around 40 interfaces for archiving different types of content. Designed to integrate easily with any existing infrastructure, DataParser can run multiple configurations for more complex environments. Working with legal teams, 17a-4 successfully archives all the information that a legal team requires for responding to any litigation by providing the Chain of Custody information. Additionally, 17a-4’s DataParser tools that can confirm the integrity of a particular document to the opposing counsel. In a nutshell, DataParser acts as a single point in which all e-messaging content can be managed for legal and regulatory holds, retention policy, and eDiscovery productions.

17a-4 is working with clients to develop better documents for responding to litigation requests. Besides, 17a-4 plans to continue developing new interfaces for Zoom and Facebook communications for DataParser, without drastically changing the integral model. Having clients all across the Pacific Rim, the EU, and the US, 17a-4 is up-to-date with the ever-changing country-specific regulations and ensures that it communicates the same to its clients.