The short version: We’ve launched SmartArchive, a new communications archiving and surveillance capability that lets firms capture, retain, and review business communications across channels, emails, text messages, social media messages, and websites from one centralized, secure platform. It’s built to make communications recordkeeping straightforward: everything captured, retained, and searchable in one place, so staying audit-ready doesn’t mean stitching together a handful of separate tools. SmartArchive is the third addition to our AI-powered compliance suite, joining SmartReview and SmartAssist.
Communications recordkeeping has quietly become one of the hardest parts of staying compliant. Not because the obligation itself is new, capturing and retaining business communications has always been a core requirement for RIAs and broker-dealers but because the number of places where those communications happen keeps growing.
A conversation with a client used to mean a phone call or an email. Now it might be a text, a LinkedIn message, a reply on the firm’s website, an email, or all of the above in the same week. Each channel is a place a business communication can occur, which means each one is a place that has to be captured and retained. For most firms, that has meant cobbling together separate tools for separate channels and then hoping they can pull everything back together if an examiner asks.
We built SmartArchive to replace that patchwork with one platform.
What SmartArchive Does
SmartArchive captures, retains, and makes searchable your firm’s business communications across the channels where they actually happen all from a single, secure system. The channels it covers:
- Emails- captured and retained without relying on individual inboxes or manual archiving.
- Text messages– the channel most firms struggle to capture consistently, brought into the same archive as everything else.
- Social media messages– client and prospect conversations on social platforms, captured rather than lost.
- Websites– retained as part of the same recordkeeping system.
Everything lands in one centralized archive that’s searchable when you need it. When an examiner requests communications records, the answer comes from one place not from piecing together exports from four different tools and hoping nothing fell through the gaps between them.
Why One Platform Matters
The core problem with multi-tool communications archiving isn’t that any single tool falls short. It’s the seams between them.
When emails live in one system, texts in another, and social messages somewhere else, the firm’s complete communications record only exists in theory assembled, if it’s ever assembled at all, under the pressure of an audit request. The gaps between tools are exactly where records get missed, and missed communications records are among the most consistently scrutinized issues in examinations.
SmartArchive closes those seams by putting every channel in one archive. Capturing, retaining, and reviewing all happen in the same place, which means:
- You can respond to audits from a single system instead of reconstructing a complete record from separate exports.
- You can demonstrate oversight and review of communications that regulators expect without adding tools or complexity to your workflow.
- Nothing depends on someone remembering to pull records from a channel that lives outside the main system.
The goal is simple: make your complete communications record something that already exists in one place, rather than something you have to build when someone asks for it.
Part of an Integrated, Human-Centric Suite
SmartArchive is the third addition to our AI-powered compliance suite. It joins the two features we introduced earlier this year at the Future Proof Citywide conference in Miami Beach:
- SmartReview, our AI-powered marketing review assistant, which lets employees pre-screen content for potential compliance issues before submitting it for approval.
- SmartAssist, our AI-powered chat tool, which answers questions about SEC and FINRA rules in plain language, right inside the platform.
Adding communications archiving to that suite is a natural next step, and it reflects how we think about building compliance technology. AI features are arriving quickly across the industry, from vendors of every size. Our approach, shaped by more than a decade of listening to the firms we serve, is to be thoughtful about where innovation actually belongs. Our AI models are API-driven and built in-house. We train our own agents rather than relying on third-party providers which is a deliberate choice about incorporating AI more safely.
That’s also why our tools keep a person in the decision seat. SmartReview helps employees catch potential issues early, but the decision to approve stays with a human. It’s the same philosophy behind everything we build: use AI to remove friction from routine work, while keeping human judgment where it belongs. As Patrick Hunt, our CEO, put it, the firms that earn lasting trust in this industry won’t simply be the fastest to add features, they’ll be the ones that apply AI thoughtfully, staying human-centric while still being efficient, and protecting what clients actually depend on: accuracy, security, and compliance.
Built on a Foundation You Can Trust
SmartArchive is powered by technology licensed from Presults, and it’s part of a platform that has maintained SOC 2 status and served the compliance needs of firms for more than a decade. Firms can manage communication records, respond to SEC and FINRA examinations, and stay audit-ready without adding complexity to how they already work.
For more on SmartArchive, visit here.
Read the full story here.
SmartArchive is available now as part of the Smartria platform. If you’d like to see how it fits into your firm’s communications recordkeeping, we’d be glad to show you.
