With over 10,000 registered representatives, Advisor Group is one of the largest networks of independent wealth management firms in the United States. The individual firms that comprise Advisor Group foster the spirit of entrepreneurship, and to support their success, the firm invests significant resources across the network. As part of that commitment, Advisor Group’s network of financial professionals enjoy state-of-the-art technologies, personalized service, and broad-based operational support.
When video conferencing platforms emerged as an innovative way to engage with customers, Advisor Group saw its value as an important resource for the firm’s employees and network of financial professionals. The firm adopted Zoom and quickly rolled it out. As a financial services organization Advisor Group had a regulatory obligation under Advertising Regulation FINRA Rule 2210 to review video communications to ensure they are fair, balanced, and not misleading.
Advisor Group understood the growing demand by its advisor team to leverage recorded video to better serve the clients and grow their businesses. A regulatory concern arose for the firm when Advisor Group identified that many internal employees were recording their Zoom meetings.
“As the popularity and use of video conferencing grew, we saw that people across our network were also starting to record their meetings and store the MP4 video file. This was introducing a regulatory issue that we needed to manage,” said Sean Mannello, Senior Advertising Analyst at Advisor Group.
The Compliance Team collaborated with IT to initiate a process of documenting and supervising the recordings. The initial effort was an involved, multi-step workflow that required a lot of manual, time-intensive effort uploading, downloading, and managing new recordings. From there, the compliance team had to review the recording, as well as manually document and manage the review workflow process. Collectively, the end-to-end cycle was taking upwards of 100 minutes of resource time for each video recording.
“The go-forward supervision process was a concern. We knew that the MP4 recording files were going to be huge and the amount of data would grow. The information was also going to be difficult and time consuming not only to review but also to physically handle with all of the uploads, downloads, and other required touchpoints,” said Mannello.
To find out why Advisor Group selected Theta Lake as its security and compliance partner for its modern collaboration platforms and the results of that implementation, click here.
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