Global RegTech Leader Expands Offerings in Electronic Communications Archiving, Compliance and E-Discovery for Largest Multi-National Enterprises
Smarsh Well-Positioned to Help Regulated Organizations Meet the Communications Data Strategy, Retention & Oversight Challenges Exacerbated by Worldwide Shift to Hybrid Work
Smarsh, enabling organizations to manage the risk and uncover the value within their electronic communications, announced that it will acquire the Digital Safe archiving and risk management portfolio from Micro Focus following required customary regulatory approvals, expected in the first calendar quarter of 2022.
The addition of the Digital Safe customer base, technology and team of subject-matter experts strengthens Smarsh’s position in Enterprise Information Archiving and accelerates execution of its global growth strategy.
“Solving the sophisticated archiving, compliance and e-discovery needs of the largest regulated multi-national companies requires scale, flexibility and support infrastructure,” said Brian Cramer, Smarsh CEO. “This acquisition partners two experienced leaders, both with a proven track record of supporting our respective customers.”
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With its portfolio of market-leading capture and archiving technology, powered by artificial intelligence and deployable on the world’s leading cloud infrastructure providers, Smarsh is well-positioned to meet the sophisticated and evolving archiving, compliance and e-discovery needs of the largest regulated multi-national organizations. It currently serves over 6500 customers, including many of the largest global and American investment and commercial banks.
“We’re excited to welcome Digital Safe archiving customers and employees to the Smarsh family,” added Cramer. “Existing mutual customers will benefit from this union through greater continuity in their communications infrastructure and communications data strategy. This acquisition also enables Smarsh to better serve our cross-border financial services customers and to expand our footprint in other heavily regulated industries.”
With today’s hybrid workforce, the volume and variety of electronic communications that regulated organizations need to retain and monitor is growing at an unprecedented rate. Workstream collaboration platforms, like Microsoft Teams and Zoom, are critical for the hybrid office, but they create multi-modal communications data (chat, voice, etc.) that must be captured, retained and supervised for regulatory compliance.
Meanwhile, international regulators are leveraging artificial intelligence in the oversight and examination of member firms, and are keenly tuned to gaps in records retention and supervision. The SEC collected a record $4.7 billion in fines in 2020, and FINRA enforcement cases increased across the board.1 International data privacy and data residency requirements are also becoming more complex, with new guidelines being implemented in many parts of the world. As a result, firms are seeking greater deployment flexibility in order to satisfy those jurisdictional requirements.
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“This is a strong, strategic move that enables greater global innovation and growth for both Digital Safe and the Smarsh customer base,” said Scott Richards, Senior VP and GM of Information Management and Governance at Micro Focus. “Smarsh has built its growth and reputation through electronic communications archiving and compliance, with continued innovation in artificial intelligence and cloud deployability. This focus will serve Digital Safe customers well, who will be able to leverage Smarsh capture capabilities on day one to deliver new content sources to their existing Digital Safe environments.”
The Digital Safe business includes the Digital Safe product and the complementary offerings of Social Media Governance, Supervisor and eDiscovery.
“Smarsh and Micro Focus each have a powerful heritage in the archiving space, with significant combined experience in archiving for compliance,” said Stephen Marsh, Smarsh Founder and Chairman. “Having an experienced partner and the right strategy to implement to support the retention and oversight of electronic communications has never been more critical. Data volume is growing by orders of magnitude. New communications channels are being used for business every day and legacy archiving technology is challenged by the volume and complexity. Regulatory scrutiny is evolving. The status quo is not a strategy. This challenge is not going away and solving it will grow more difficult, expensive and invite more risk with every day that passes.”
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