Hearsay Social enhances social media compliance tools

The new tools will provide financial services firms and their compliance officers better oversight in managing advisors’ electronic communications

By: Tessie Sanci
December 10, 2015 December 10, 2015
16:35

San Francisco-based Hearsay Social Inc. has launched a new set of compliance tools that will help Canadian financial services firms catch financial advisors who use unauthorized social media profiles or are posting false information in addition to other problematic issues.

The new features are designed to increase the productivity of compliance officers, who are expected to monitor employees’ communications across websites, social media and mobile devices, according to a Hearsay Social media release issued on Thursday.

“Managing brand governance and regulatory compliance for distributed field organizations can be challenging, especially as communication channels evolve and new ones emerge,” says Steve Garrity, founder and chief operating officer with Hearsay Social, which helps financial services firms manage advisors’ electronic communications, in a statement.

The new tools include a “rogue social account finder” that can track down social media profiles that are being used for business purposes by advisors but have not been approved by the advisor’s firm. There is also a data verification feature, which will help compliance officials locate false information on advisors’ social media profiles. Both resources have received patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Hearsay Social is also making it easier for compliance officials to review changes to advisors’ digital communications by highlighting updated text and making it possible to compare the new text to historical versions with one click.

Other features include the ability to customize different control procedures for each mode of communication, whether it’s text messaging, email, social media posts or websites. The financial services firm can choose what words within a form of communication will trigger a notification to its compliance department and whether those words would apply to all electronic channels or just certain ones.

In addition, a problematic message in another language will not escape notice as financial services firms can now include non-Roman characters in their list of words to catch. This means that non-compliant messages in languages such as Chinese and Japanese will trigger alerts to the compliance department.

Hearsay Social’s new compliance capabilities are currently available at no additional cost to its customers that already subscribe to any of its products.