Supervision and discovery of electronic communications in the financial services industry

Abstract

Current SEC and NASD rules require securities brokers and dealers to maintain, supervise, and periodically review electronic communications. We present a solution called Galaxy that provides automatic supervision and indepth discovery of email, instant messages, and other electronic communications to enable compliance with these rules. Galaxy's supervision component analyzes these communications to enforce company policies and detect potential violations. It allows compliance officers to generate powerful and flexible rules to implement information screens within an organization and detect suspicious text patterns in incoming and outgoing communications. Galaxy's discovery component enables companies to respond to litigation discovery requests efficiently. It also supports internal investigations by allowing analysts to focus their results along various search dimensions and visualize relationships among entities. In this paper, we describe Galaxy's architecture, illustrate the functionality of its supervision and discovery components using financial services scenarios, and propose topics for future research.