Retirement Wealth Advisors
Simplifying high-volume website and social media recordkeeping for compliance with Pagefreezer
Want this case study as a downloadable PDF?
About Retirement Wealth Advisors
“Founded in 2005, Retirement Wealth Advisors (RWA) was built to serve the specific needs of retired or soon to be retired investors, offering a range of services from financial planning, to retirement income planning and investment management.”
RWA is a full service, independent wealth management firm registered with the SEC and headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Over the past 10 years, RWA has expanded throughout the United States, serving over 6,000 clients through over 130 independent financial advisors.
Content Challenges
Communicating with clients online is done not only through its main website, but also through over 130 advisor-level websites providing different levels of communication. RWA’s websites are undoubtedly content heavy. The firm provides a weekly market commentary, accumulating throughout the year. It also provides monthly portfolio reviews using event-driven news to help evaluate the strategy, performance, decision making and markets affecting its portfolios.
Static pages like the Homepage and About Us pages aside, the majority of RWA’s content is dynamic and ever-evolving, at an average of 500-1000 web page updates throughout the year.
RWA also makes use of primary social media platforms Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin to further push out its content and key messaging.
“Having a reliable archiving solution in place is an absolute must for firms like us that publish so much online.” – Jason Wenk, CEO
Regulatory Compliance
Content aside, RWA, like many in the financial services industry is under watch by regulators and subject to audits. As a SEC-registered company, the firm must regularly comply with specific recordkeeping expectations. Among them:
SEC 17A-3 AND 17-A4
In a recent regulatory notice concerning blogs and social networking sites, SEC stated that firms must retain records of all business related electronic communications to remain compliant with Rule 17a-3 and Rule 17a-4 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and NASD.
RULE 17A-4(B)
The SEC issued a rule that requires firms to keep records for business communications even if only distributed internally. It also states that broker-dealers must preserve records for a period of not less than three years, with the first two in an easily accessible place.
RULE 17A-4(B)
The SEC issued a rule that requires firms to keep records for business communications
FINRA REGULATORY NOTICE 10-6 AND 11-39
These laws focus on issues relating to the use of social media, including expectations for record-keeping, supervision and responding to third-party posts and links.
“The SEC makes it very clear that in our industry, we have to not only archive, but have offsite backups, and be able to recall any changes and when exactly they were made.”
Server Backup Limitations
To attempt to manage these expectations, RWA was using a server backup, utilizing a local server and script, that would mirror backups through an AWS Amazon server.
General feedback highlighted the fact that this was a very labour-intensive process, and one that offered too much room to accidentally miss a step or backup. Additional feedback revealed the system was very cookie-cutter in its approach and was not flexible in keeping up with industry changes.
“As regulations change, we didn’t want to always feel like we always had to be the ones to be responsible to change as the industry change. We wanted a solution that would update this as it went.”
The Pagefreezer Solution
What RWA needed was an industry-specific solution that was capable of automatically (and reliably) archiving large amounts of content and that was also versatile in its ability to update as regulations changed.
An in-house and outside compliance team selected Pagefreezer as rwa’s archiving solution of choice based on a hierarchy of trust, strong recommendationon, and its experience in the financial services industry.
Pagefreezer took the huge task of archiving RWA’s heavy website and social media content and made it simple:
- Pagefreezer provided automatic archiving using webcrawling technology (deriving from search engine crawling technologies) and harvesters (for real-time archiving) to capture pages. This keeps RWA’s archives up to date, complete and readily accessible, ready for audits or special requests with prompt export functions.
- The preservation and storage of digital content with Pagefreezer uses the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model. Pagefreezer took responsibility for RWA’s archives, storing them for RWA, independent of specific technologies and databases.
- As required by FINRA and the FCRP, Pagefreezer assisted in RWA in preserving original records in original formats. RWA was now able to save records in HTML, CSS, Javascript, XML, rather than being limited by PDFs and screenshots.
- Pagefreezer provided RWA with acceptable archives for data integrity and authenticity standards, bearing SHA-256 digital signature and timestamps.
- Given RWA’s frequency of web page updates, Pagefreezer assisted with its powerful search functionality across archived material. Detailed keyword searches coupled with unique calendar and timeline features helped RWA observe how their web pages have changed over time across websites.
- Pagefreezer also took care of RWA’s social media archiving, integrating its social media capabilities flawlessly with RWA’s third party Compliance Review and Enterprise Archive system.
ROI
The benefits of using Pagefreezer were clear from the beginning, and were brought to light in a recent SEC books and records exam. As a result of utilizing Pagefreezer, RWA had all required information readily accessible and in the proper formats, making the exam a breeze.
RWA has since seen witnessed positive ROI in terms of time saved, compared to the previously labour intensive server process. Furthermore, RWA considers its biggest ROI to be its improved ability to focus on what it does best, leaving the daunting archiving process to Pagefreezer’s capabilities.
Pagefreezer For Financial Services
Website and social media archiving is rapidly becoming the preferred method of records retention for financial organizations concerned with regulatory compliance and effective web analytics. You can protect and empower your business by putting Pagefreezer’s powerful technologies to work for you. As the archiving industry grows and evolves, we are committed to continued innovation, ensuring that our customers always have access to the most comprehensive, robust archiving technologies available.
FINRA, SEC and FCA regulatory notices concerning websites explicitly state that firms must retain records of all business related electronic communications to remain compliant. Below is an overview of associated regulations affecting the financial services industry, with examples of how Pagefreezer helps to serve them.
1. Records should be managed so that they can be reproduced in a timely and complete manner. [as required by 2006 changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.] Pagefreezer provides an automated system for the gathering, storing and retrieval of all company website content. Pagefreezer uses crawling technology, similar to that of Google, to take snapshots of your website. Archiving is an automated process, saving you time. With dynamically monitoring, new web pages and changes to web pages are noted, so your archive is always up to date.
2. Records must be preserved in whatever medium they were originally produced. [as required by the Investment Dealers Assoc. of Canada, FINRA, and the FRCP.] With Pagefreezer, your data is yours and remains yours. When dealing with a legal claim that requires a physical copy of your files, or when you need a local copy for any other reason, get a data export of all your archived files. HTML, CSS, Javascript, XML, get the complete and accurate files and file structure that existed on that specific date.
3. Records must be kept for periods of up to seven years. [as required by SEC, FINRA, IDA of Canada, FSA of the UK, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.] Powerful search functions allow you to quickly find archived pages. Narrow your search by website, date, keywords and more. Easily dig up that web page you’re looking for.
4. Records must bear proof of data integrity and authenticity [as required by the Federal Rules of Evidence.] With Pagefreezer’s SHA-256 digital signature/Timestamp, you can prove the archived web pages are not altered over time and adhere to evidentiary guidelines such as FRCP, and FRE. Each page is time stamped with an ANSI X9.95 compliant Time Stamp Authority securely synchronized with the certified atomic clocks of a Stratum-1 Time Server.
Ready to simplify compliance and audits?
Let us show you how Pagefreezer’s automated archiving can replace manual backups and deliver compliance peace of mind.
1-888-916-3999
support@pagefreezer.com
Head Office:
#500-311 Water Street
Vancouver, BC V6B 1B8
Canada
Europe Office:
Van Leeuwenhoekpark 1 - Office 5
2611 DW, Delft
The Netherlands
UK Office:
+44 20 3744 7173
Australia Office:
+61 (07) 3186 2199
Subscribe to our Blog
Get targeted Industry news, great tips and valuable insights
