RSM EquiCo Capital Markets, a leading investment management firm working primarily with private, middle-market businesses, has converted its homegrown email archiving solution to Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive to prepare for regulatory audits.

The firm originally had an archiving solution that had been built using Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client. The decision to move to a more dynamic email archiving solution came when the firm received notice of an upcoming National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) audit. RSM EquiCo Capital Markets would need to improve access to archived emails and demonstrate easier supervision and monitoring of emails to satisfy auditors.

“Our in-house solution allowed us to retain email messages, but providing immediate access to email for supervision and monitoring was beyond our system’s capabilities,” said John Dal Poggetto, RSM EquiCo Capital Market’s chief compliance officer. “We needed a partner to come in and implement a system that wasn’t time-consuming and required no significant capital outlay.”

The firm initially had security concerns about using a third-party service provider. However, Dal Poggetto’s team was impressed by the level of security in the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services’ secure data network. In addition, an outsourced solution would not require additional hardware or software, and would eliminate the need for using internal IT resources to provide maintenance and support for the system.

“With the predictable monthly rate that Exchange Hosted Services provides, there is no way that our in-house solution could have offered us an even remotely similar application at our current costs.”

The Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive service provides RSM EquiCo Capital Markets with tamper-proof message storage, a system for regular supervisory review of incoming and outgoing messages based on statistical sampling, and reporting functionality required by the NASD and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that includes predefined custom reports. Easy accessibility by employees reduced administrative burdens of looking for past email.

The firm passed its NASD audit, as well as a later SEC audit. One auditor’s request was for the last 90 days of emails from several targeted broker/dealers. The service was able to fulfill this request easily, saving the firm what would have been hours of restoring contents of servers from backup tapes, had it still been using its old system.