AdvisorVault Revolutionizes 17a-4 Archiving for Small FINRA firms

AdvisorVault’s new features are a game changer for small FINRA firms who want to use the cloud but are worried about 17a-4. With their unique consolidated platform AdvisorVault now combines email and electronic records archiving to give centralized access to data stored in the cloud.

“This changes everything for small firms because now they can take advantage of services like Office 365 and G Suite and AdvisorVault will seamlessly plug into the cloud and act as their 17a-4 D3P, making the cloud instantly compliant for them. “ Said Allan Lonz, President of AdvisorVault, “Our direct cloud connector supports all major cloud platforms and will archive electronic records as well as emails for full retention and supervision,” Added Lonz.

AdvisorVault continually adds new features to its cloud archiving platform to make sure small firms have a one stop D3P for everything. Some key features of AdvisorVault’s cloud archiving platform:

Direct Cloud Connector

AdvisorVault’s remote archiving software connects directly into all popular cloud services such as Office 365, OneDrive, SharePoint, Dropbox, and the Google Suite. Also, AdvisorVault instantly captures full data sets from the cloud. This means firms can restore everything including office docs in their native format, full Office 365 and Gmail accounts with contacts and calendars, as well as all data stored in SharePoint sites with access to records saved in personal or group/team drives.

Automatic Detection of New Cloud Data

AdvisorVault’s software automatically detects new cloud data sets as they are created. For example, as a firm adds new users in Office 365, SharePoint, or OneDrive sites, its automatically added to our 17a-4 archive. This applies to G Suite as well where user accounts are frequently added including their personal or team drives. With our automatic detection, compliance officers don’t need to notify us every time new employees are added to the cloud.

Electronic Records Retention

AdvisorVault applies a 7-year blanket retention rule to ALL customer data relating to their business. This simplifies the whole data archiving retention process because with this policy firms don’t need to separate different data types then try to apply a unique retention policy to each set, which is impossible to maintain, especially for a small firm without an IT dept.

Downloading and Data Retention

At the end of the day, the reason AdvisorVault acts as the D3P for its customers is to help them maintain access to their archived electronic records or emails when needed. AdvisorVault includes a secure Web portal for customers to access their 17a-4 data archive. Lastly, we retain cloud data for customers that have been removed and keep them in our 17a-4 archive for 7 yrs. Keeping electronic records from users that have been removed from the cloud will also help with compliance since old employee data is often requested during audits.