Complexity archived at Essex National Securities

PORTLAND, USA: Essex National Securities, LLC (ENSI), an independent broker-dealer, has migrated to Smarsh for email and social media archiving.

ENSI provides tools and services for geographically dispersed banks and their advisors and dissatisfied with the archiving solution it was offering to clients, the firm sought a new provider to streamline supervision and reduce costs. Smarsh was ultimately selected for its workflow efficiency, ability to support large and complex installations and reputation for customer service, an announcement tells.

“We evaluated several other competing solutions, but it came down to the fact that Smarsh provides the technology and support to help me do my job better,” said John Cooney, chief compliance officer at ENSI. “With Smarsh, I spend less time on oversight and more time honing our broader compliance strategy.”

Smarsh, as further highlighted in the note, helped ENSI improve supervision efficiencies by significantly reducing the number of electronic messages needed to review and its Archiving Platform filters out irrelevant messages while providing deeper insight into potential infractions.

ENSI states it can easily measure the compliance team’s progress and oversee its supervision efforts across geographically distributed branches. Smarsh also provides an added financial benefit, saving ENSI an estimated $80,000 per year on licensing fees alone.

“With more than 300 representatives at different bank branches, multiple email platforms and 27 different domains in place, email and social media compliance supervision was a large and complex task,” said Garth Howard, chief information officer at ENSI. “Smarsh helps reduce these complexities with a turnkey solution that makes our business more productive, ultimately allowing us to do the same thing for our customers.”

ENSI finds it easy to manage the technical complexities of migrating to a new archiving provider as it adds how the Smarsh support team freed up ENSI IT staff during the migration by working directly with ENSI’s individual bank clients to set up new users, answer questions and resolve system issues.

“Retention and supervision are important functions for any firm, large or small, but shouldn’t create unnecessary burden or take away from other business priorities,” said Stephen Marsh, CEO of Smarsh.