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Smarsh – Planet Compliance RegTech Interview (2021)

smarsh

Let’s start with a brief introduction, what can you tell us about Smarsh and your RegTech offering?

Smarsh provides technology that allows firms to capture, store, review, and analyse electronic communications in order to meet regulatory, e-discovery, and policy enforcement demands. We provide these capabilities across over 80 different communications formats, including social media, collaborative, voice, video, email, and other sources.

What are some of the biggest challenges your solutions you solve for your clients?

The biggest challenges faced by firms that our solutions solve include 1) keeping up with the latest tools being used by your employees and demanded by your clients, 2) maintaining this information in a state that allows compliance and legal stakeholders to efficiently search, review, and execute policy decisions, and 3) keeping up with changes in the regulatory and data privacy environments in all markets they operate within. Our solutions make it is easy to capture, archive, analyse, and understand communications data from the latest tools, while maintaining the context and rich metadata so that you can be confident and compliant without sacrificing your ability to communicate and collaborate.

Could you give us a use case of why a client came to you and how they are using your solution to solve their particular challenge? 

A common use case are global banks that are attempting to modernize their technology infrastructure including the replacement of their on-premises legacy archiving system with a modern, cloud-native solution. We were able to help them improve their ability to access, search, review, and export business communications and deploy solutions in new geographic regions to meet local regulatory and privacy mandates. This solution also enabled the firm to achieve a lower cost of ownership, and provided the agility to respond to future technological trends and evolution in the regulatory environment.

How would you describe the differences between your offering from others in your RegTech category?

 Three key differences to note are 1) our system is designed to understand, capture, and preserve any form of unstructured information (unlike other systems in our market that were designed for email), 2) our cloud-native design allows Smarsh to leverage and deploy innovations in public cloud infrastructure including AWS and Microsoft Azure, and 3) the openness and extensibility of the system with fully accessible APIs enable firms to share communications information with other enterprise applications.

What advice would you give to decision makers when choosing a RegTech solution such as the ones your offer?

Our suggestions are to 1) understand the communications and collaborative technologies that are demanded by their customers and employees today, 2) examine existing archiving, supervisory, and investigative tools to establish whether they are suited for purpose to address today’s market demands, and 3) to look for technologies that are open and extensible to avoid vendor lock-in and anticipate the next communications sources

Due to the global pandemic a lot has changed in the world in the last year. How has your company changed in the last 12 months?

Like every company, our business has been transformed and the way we get work done has been fundamentally and irreversibly changed. We are spending all day on Zooms, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and mobile applications, and companies and have had to examine how that information is being controlled and monitored for communications risks. Demand from the market is being led by these collaborative, conferencing, and mobile-first messaging tools as companies now prepare for a work-from-anywhere future.

Can you tell us about some of your most recent achievements or milestones you’ve reached?

 Most notably, we have again been named as a Leader in the Gartner Enterprise Information Archiving Magic Quadrant, with 2020 positioning Smarsh as the provider that is furthest up and right, indicating a singular leadership position. Additionally, we have recently expanded our portfolio to enhance our offerings in the area of machine learning and conduct surveillance through the acquisition of Digital Reasoning, a leader in this category. Together, we have formed a new market category that we are describing as Communications Intelligence.

What drives you as a company? what is Smarsh’s long term vision?

From the start of the company, we have had a singular mission – to allow businesses to use the communications and collaborative tools of their choice. We provide the compliance controls that allow them to capitalize on the productivity gains, customer satisfaction gains, and enhanced agility provided by supporting today’s innovations in communications technology.

What are some of the important developments you are seeing in the RegTech industry?

We are seeing companies embracing advances in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and content surveillance in order to improve the effectiveness of identifying risk across disparate data sources, and to spot patterns and trends that could help better understand customer preferences and market dynamics. We see that Communications Intelligence is a perfect use case to leverage these technology advances for any firm that faces heavy regulation of frequent, disruptive ediscovery.

What’s next for Smarsh?

Our mission is to stay in front of the next network, and continue to enhance the value of the information we have under management. There will always be additional use cases and value that can be enhanced by tapping into a complete, well managed, and scalable information infrastructure. We will continue to help organizations to increase the value of their information as an asset to the business.

What is Communications Intelligence?

Communications is the powerful and singularly unique combination of Smarsh, the global leader in capturing and archiving data, along with Digital Reasoning, the leading AI company that understands human communications at scale. Ultimately, using AI and machine learning helps firms more efficiently supervise and mitigate risk at scale, and will now enable them to analyse their electronic communications, and leverage all of their data as an asset to uncover business intelligence that can fuel sales and other revenue drivers.

What’s the best way for potential clients or investors to get in touch with you?

We can be reached by phone at any of the following numbers:

Toll Free: 1-866-SMARSH-1 (866-762-7741)

US: 1-503-946-5980

EMEA: +44 (0) 20 3608 1209

Potential clients can email us at sales@smarsh.com

Potential investors can email us at info@smarsh.com

Planet Compliance

Planet Compliance is a marketplace where institutions and corporates can discover RegTech and LegalTech solutions. Planet Compliance also operates a content platform that provides information and insights on technology, regulation, compliance, finance and innovation.
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