A fintech startup may have just opened the door to more compliant texting and social media for advisors.
San Mateo, Calif-based txtsmarter announced on Tuesday that its enterprise information archiving platform is the first capable of archiving all communications on WhatsApp for regulatory compliance. Facebook-owned WhatsApp hosts an average of 65 billion messages and 55 million video chat from 1.5 billion users in 180 countries every day, making it one of the world’s largest messaging platforms.
The txtsmarter software captures, encrypts and archives messages from social media applications. In addition to WhatsApp, txtsmarter also incorporates archiving capabilities for Apple iMessage and Android SMS/MMS.
The firm claims that txtstarter enables compliance across all current regulations in the U.S. and Europe.
"Increasing regulatory compliance across many industries means both businesses and individuals have a legal responsibility to demonstrate their ability to provide a complete audit trail of all related mobile communications on demand,” said Nuri Otis, txtsmarter founder and CEO in comments released on Tuesday. “Most people are still not aware that communications conducted using carrier text messaging are not archived by the carrier. The impact of this oversight can be devastating both professionally and personally. This is why the availability of these archiving capabilities are a game-changer, particularly for businesses or sole traders operating within highly regulated environments."
The WhatsApp functionality comes as Covid-19 has led millions of workers and consumers to use mobile devices as a primary communications tool. Now, the txtsmarter platform will be able to offer advisors “peace of mind” that they are able to use text and social media messaging without taking on additional compliance risk.
txtsmarter's announcement was made via the 2020 Collision From Home conference.