Portland, Ore.-based compliance and archiving technology firm Smarsh announced on Thursday that it is acquiring Santa Clara, Calif.-based Entreda, a cybersecurity provider for the wealth management industry.
The deal blends Smarsh’s regulation technology (regtech)—offering advisors archiving for compliant social media communications—with Entreda’s cybersecurity risk and compliance management software.
“Driving both Entreda and Smarsh is the fact that advisors and brokers are being pushed to use social media and other platforms that were typically forbidden from a compliance perspective, like LinkedIn and Facebook,” said Brian Cramer, CEO of Smarsh. Using those platforms opens advisors up to two types of regulatory compliance risk, he said. “One is on the client side where the SEC and Finra require the firm to keep records of all compliant communications. It also opens them up to a whole host of security issues.”
Regtech and cybersecurity form a junction in the area of compliance, as financial industry regulators have increasingly focused on firms’ ability to protect client information and respond quickly to potential vulnerabilities and breaches.
Entreda brings with it 300 client relationships, including Advisor Group’s 11,000-strong advisor workforce.
“We saw some synergies right away,” said Entreda CEO Sid Yenamandra. “We wanted to partner with someone who had brand and financial scale, and Smarsh has a history in this place. Smarsh is a key player in the regtech space. There are a lot of product synergies between what we are doing. There are cultural synergies, too.”
Entreda will retain its brand identity, and will continue to be led by Yenamandra. Existing clients of both firms should expect no immediate changes to their services.
“I would expect a lot more fluidity in terms of how we promote the products and go about introducing our customers to these products,” said Cramer. “This has done an awesome job in scaling the data.
“Smarsh has somewhere on the order of 6,500 customers, not all of which have a security platform such as Entreda, so there’s a lot of opportunity for us there. In the more medium-term horizon, we’ll be announcing things that are more innovative in the areas where we overlap.”
Yenamandra added that Entreda will also focus on building a better customer service experience.
“When you’re working in the independent advisor and independent broker-dealer world, dealing with the fanatically independent advisor, support and client focus is extremely important,” said Yenamandra. “It’s not something you can do well just by building product. You need scale for that. Our being with Smarsh gives us the ability to build our customer teams and create a higher level of service, and that’s something our current customers can expect going forward.”