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Erado lands another big independent broker-dealer

Chalk up another sizeable broker-dealer customer win to Erado Message Control Solutions, the e-mail and social media archiving…

Chalk up another sizeable broker-dealer customer win to Erado Message Control Solutions, the e-mail and social media archiving and compliance technology vendor.
Yes, that last bit is a mouth full.
In this case Erado will be working with National Planning Holdings Inc., which has engaged them to provide social media compliance services to its 3,500 affiliated representatives beginning this fall.
That means Erado will monitor, track and archive the social media traffic of NPH’s advisers carried on the current big three social networks: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
The agreement with Erado covers each of the four broker-dealers in the NPH network: Invest Financial
Corp., Investment Centers of America Inc., National Planning Corp., and SII Investments, Inc.
While it is totally speculation on my part, it does not seem much of a stretch to imagine the army of other advisers affiiated or working with Jackson National Life Insurance Company one day soon using the service too (NPH is a broker-dealer holding company and an affiliate of Jackson National).
Both Commonwealth Financial Network and LPL Financial announced in June that they would begin using Erado.

SO WHAT ABOUT GOOGLE+ ?

This latest bit of news got me to wondering about that latest social media Gorilla in the room, Google+.
(If you have no idea what I’m talking about here’s a link back to the original official Google Blog post on the subject)
Can any of the current crop of compliance and archiving systems being used by broker-dealers or registered investment advisory firms handle this latest social media network?
The quick answer is no.
[UPDATE 7-27 1419hrs: Mea Culpa, make that “yes,” see the comment from Russ below. Moderately tech-savvy Independent RIAs (and brokers with freedom to) should be able to cobble this archiving process together; also the folks at Arkovi themselves just published their own very straightforward post on the process of how to capture and archive your public Google+ posts]
That means most advisers and brokers are probably going to be told they cannot use Google+ for work-related social networking.
Google will have to be more forthcoming with sharing its Gmail application programming interface, which provides the fundamental underpinnings to the new service, network, or whatever you want to call it.
Full access to that API could end up being a pretty thorny thing.
All that aside I know lots of advisers are trying out Google+, though I am sure it is only on a personal level so far.
Because of this, advisory firms, broker-dealers and the regulators are going to be scratching their heads for some time to come.
With the fresh news in mind I put the question of Google+ to Erado chief executive Craig Brauff.
He wrote me back in an e-mail that his firm is excited about adding compliance solutions around the Google+ platform to the rest of its suite of Social Media compliance services but that at the moment it represents just too much of a moving target.
“Google+ is quickly evolving and we feel that the product’s privacy settings, and feature sets we see today will be significantly different tomorrow,” he wrote.
Having covered Google for a long time I have to agree.
It is hard for me to imagine the c-suite folks letting the developers at Google rein in the new + phenomenon any time soon to formalize an API.
(Those really interested in such things owe it to themselves to keep abreast of what Google is sharing with developers on the Google Code pages.)
After all it has been growing far more rapidly — some would argue virally since it relies on its foundation of Gmail users — than any of the social media networks or services that grew out of a more organic process of expansion.
After the disaster that was Google Buzz who can blame them for letting it run loose a while longer anyway.

ADVISOR GROUP GOES WITH SUNGARD

In this catch all post on social media I decided to cover something I lacked the time to a few weeks back.
Advisor Group formally announced it had launched a social media effort on July 6 (just in case you did not remember, Advisor Group is the independent-broker-dealer business of American International Group Inc.)
A big part of that effort is the Protegent Social Media Surveillance product from SunGard Data Systems Inc.
That product has been deployed on Advisor Group’s proprietary Vision 2020 platform.
Advisers will access social media features through an interface built on the Vision 2020 Advisor Portal, which is a single sign-on website.
From here advisers can get access not only to social media, but client account information, office automation, compliance and marketing tools as well.
This is all in addition to the re-launch of the firm’s Vision 2020 Wealth Management system for fee based advisers at the end of May.
Specifically, Protegent is meant to provide Advisor Group with a somewhat turnkey compliance monitoring and archiving system to stay in regulatory compliance and can further customize with additional policies over time.
Advisor Group also announced that they had begun to offer online and live training courses in social media for their advisers.
There is a Marketing Library of more than 3,500 pre-approved messages and documents there they can draw from or they can create their own, subject to compliance-approval of course.