For some time, financial services firms have encountered challenges in achieving a balance between productivity and regulatory compliance, particularly with regard to drawing the line on whether to adopt cutting-edge collaboration technologies or adhere to strict regulatory mandates, such as retaining and supervising electronic communications. As modern collaboration rapidly evolves to new paradigms of richer media, specifically dynamic whiteboarding content like those from Mural, remaining compliant remains a constant challenge. Research has shown that almost 40 percent of organizations use virtual whiteboard apps with another 32 percent planning to adopt them. Regulated industries, such as financial services, are also adopting these platforms at a rapid rate, yearning to embrace new ways of engaging clients and collaborating internally while striking a balance between innovation and compliance.
The challenge that has plagued adopters of these new technologies has been that the necessary compliance solutions to archive electronic communications records from digital whiteboarding platforms like Mural are largely non-existent. Legacy enterprise information archiving vendors, built for email, have strict constraints on rich media, such as limited support for file size, which add complexity when handling the potentially immense size of digital whiteboards. Compliance for digital whiteboard platforms is also challenging due to their ever-changing nature which is constantly updated with rich content including images, files, shapes, objects, links, and previews. A lack of compliance support can lead to reluctance in sanctioning whiteboard use, frustrating end users and inhibiting productivity.
In an effort to bridge this gap and enable financial services organizations on their digital transformation journey, Theta Lake has partnered with the industry-leading visual collaboration platform, Mural, to offer the first and only compliance solution for dynamic whiteboard content. The partnership enables distributed teams in highly regulated industries to confidently use Mural for collaboration and idea-sharing, without sacrificing on compliance requirements. Mural is widely regarded as a leader in its industry and is known for its best-in-class product, which is a favorite among distributed teams looking to collaborate and share ideas in a visually engaging and dynamic way.
“Digital whiteboards are key productivity tools for firms and a corresponding concern for global financial services regulators.” says Marc Gilman, General Counsel & VP of Compliance at Theta Lake. “Whiteboards are considered regulated communications requiring capture, retention, and supervision as outlined by FINRA in recent FAQs and other global regulators like ESMA. Whiteboard content like diagrams, illustrations, text, and comments all constitute communications triggering relevant compliance mandates. Theta Lake’s partnership with Mural enables compliant capture of dynamic content and demonstrates a shared vision for unlocking the value of whiteboards across regulated organizations.”
As part of the partnership, Theta Lake and Mural have developed a seamless integration of compliance capabilities for Mural's digital whiteboard content. Theta Lake provided its compliance industry expertise to Mural during the development phase of their API, and collaborated with Mural to build an API-based integration for Mural content capture, archiving, and supervision. The integration allows Theta Lake’s Compliance Platform to capture Mural whiteboard’s activity logs along with snapshots of the entire canvas, and seamlessly integrate them into an organization’s archive or record-keeping arrangement.
| "I am excited about the Theta Lake partnership with Mural! With this first-of-its-kind integration, our enterprise customers in regulated industries, particularly financial services, will be empowered to transform their collaboration workflow with Mural while fulfilling their compliance obligations" said Bentley Rubinstein, AVP Strategic Partnerships at Mural. |
Together, Theta Lake and Mural usher a new era of collaboration for financial services firms, one where these companies get the best of both worlds: cutting-edge collaboration platforms and a powerful compliance solution. This combination will allow financial services companies to balance productivity and compliance, while also fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation in the workplace.