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This story originally appeared on Financial Advisor IQ sister publication FundFire.

Almost four years after Securities and Exchange CommissionInvestigating the unauthorized use of employees’ personal devices to discuss company business, companies are assessing which communications platforms their employees can use – and which should be avoided – as the regulator expands its actions to include registered investment advisers and asset managers.

So far SEC i Commodity Futures Trading Commission levied a total of more than $3 billion in fines and penalties under the law 60 brokers and other financial institutions – including a $6.5 million penalty imposed last month by RIAs – after employees and even senior executives used unauthorized messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal, in to discuss business interests in violation of record keeping rules. As reported, companies’ failure to maintain or archive communications outside of their employees’ communications channel has in some cases prevented the SEC from using these message exchanges in its investigations.

As a result, many industry firms have streamlined their compliance programs and are conducting mock SEC exams. According to compliance consultants, some are even using artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to detect off-channel communications.

“When the SEC started to really look at these off-channel communications and the settlements came to light, people started to take notice — they really took a very close look at their policies and procedures,” he said Lance Shieldpartner in K&L gates. “The natural reaction across the industry was… to be more conservative and take less risk. You could actually see people’s actions tightening up.”

He added that the investigation led many companies to strictly ban the use of social media to communicate with customers. Many companies have also ordered employees to communicate closely via company email Carlo di Florioglobal consulting leader in the company ACA Group.

There has also been a “huge increase” in companies issuing enterprise devices to employees solely for business purposes. Tom VeniceManaging Director Americas at Technology Provider LeapXpert, said last month at a compliance conference hosted by ACA Group. Many of them do this in part to avoid privacy issues associated with installing software on personal devices because employees would have to consent to such monitoring, di Florio said.

Oversight of electronic communications was one of the top compliance topics – behind advertising, marketing and cybersecurity – that investment advisors identified as a concern in an ACA survey last year.

Since the SEC’s 2021 survey began, approximately 70% of the 581 companies surveyed said they had trained employees on approved communication methods and record-keeping policies, and 50% said they had instructed employees to forward unapproved communications such as text messages to personal devices, to your work email address for storage purposes.

Just over 40% said they “strictly” do not allow the use of any communication other than work email and telephone for work purposes. But many companies are reconsidering this approach because they find it impractical, di Florio said.

“Companies are thinking, ‘OK, what can we allow,’ and they’re not being too rigid about banning communications because they see that customers – and also junior employees and others – are communicating through these channels, but they’re making sure that the company really clearly which channels are OK,” he said.

If companies decide to take a permissive approach, they must make sure they “have the policies, procedures, processes and technology in place to archive and monitor these communications,” di Florio said.

“Companies are really leveraging technology that allows them to identify, archive and then monitor all business-related communications,” he added.

Some companies allow you to use communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams to discuss business. They are also investing in third-party software and applications that can tag and archive business communications on both company and personal devices, as well as monitor social media communications, compliance specialists told FundFire.

“Because the tools are available and they’re easy to use, they’re easy to install, there’s really no excuse not to use them,” he said Mario Favetta, relationship manager w Fuse Research Network. “That’s another reason why I think the SEC’s stance on this is so strict, because it really isn’t that hard to follow the rules.”

In a survey conducted during a panel at the ACA conference, 34% of the nearly 500 who responded said their companies allow internal use of Slack and Teams for business purposes, and 15% said they use LinkedIn, according to data provided to FundFire. Seventeen percent use Instant Bloomberg, and almost 10% use third-party tools such as WeChat, WhatsApp, and iMessage. Only 2.4% said they could use Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

AllianceBernstein installed security and productivity software on employees’ personal devices, Charles Sprules, the company’s chief operating officer, recently told FundFire during a video interview. The company is also steering employees toward Slack to “make it as seamless as sending a text message.”

“There’s a whole range of integrations that we’ve done with Slack that (try to) bring people onto this platform with the idea that… we’ll make them more productive (and) not come to this platform from the text side,” he said.

For wealth management advisors, the company uses an app on the user’s personal device that can capture text messages that the client can send to the advisor’s office number, Sprules added.

“The advisor doesn’t have to hand over his or her personal cell phone,” he said. “We capture all the information and the customer feels like they have this kind of ad hoc, one-on-one connection, but we manage to meet all the regulations. We focused on implementing it.”