Smarsh Completes Acquisition of TeleMessage, Extends Communications Compliance Leadership

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• USA - English

As regulatory scrutiny around off-channel communications mounts, Smarsh helps customers solve for broadest range of mobile use cases

PORTLAND, Ore., Feb. 20, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Smarsh, the global leader in digital communications compliance and intelligence, announced the successful acquisition of TeleMessage, the leader in mobile messaging and voice compliance.

"The acquisition demonstrates our commitment to continually innovating and acquiring cutting-edge technology that meets customers' evolving needs and strengthens Smarsh's leadership position in the digital communications compliance market," said Kim Crawford Goodman, Chief Executive Officer of Smarsh. "Together with TeleMessage, Smarsh extends its platform of communications compliance technologies. We now solve the broadest scope of customer mobile messaging and voice use cases, capturing data across various devices, direct capture from mobile carrier networks, corporate and employee-owned devices, and consumer and business mobile applications."

Turning off-channel on
The move is particularly crucial as regulatory scrutiny around off-channel communications continues to mount. Mobile communications such as text messages and WhatsApp are the primary culprit behind the surge in regulatory scrutiny focused on "off-channel communications."  

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently announced it had imposed $81 million in penalties to firms for failing to capture and monitor off-channel communications. These penalties are in addition to the more than $2.5 billion in fines the SEC and US Commodity Futures Trading Commission have imposed on similar offenses.

Through the acquisition, Smarsh provides customers with compliance support from capture to insight, including the broadest range of mobile communication use cases. For companies that issue mobile devices, Smarsh captures text messages directly from an expanded global footprint of mobile carriers. It provides complete separation of private and business communications for organizations that enables employees to use their personal devices for business. Smarsh has enhanced messaging and voice support for consumer messaging applications like WhatsApp, WeChat, Signal and Telegram, and offers world-class messaging and voice coverage of corporate collaboration channels like Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Slack.

"Smarsh solves for the wide range of mobile use cases that global firms have so that they can achieve compliance without compromising employee productivity," said Goutam Nadella, Chief Product Officer of Smarsh. "Our customers have a true end-to-end, AI-powered platform solution, where mobile communications data is captured at the source, retained and leveraged effectively and efficiently within downstream applications like surveillance and e-discovery."

The Smarsh platform retains mobile communications and voice data (alongside data from email, collaboration platforms, social media, websites, and other channels), making them searchable and producible on-demand for audits and investigations. Customers leverage AI-powered solutions for supervision and surveillance to meet regulatory obligations and identify and manage risks, and to manage the scale and flexibility of their communications data.

To meet the needs of its customers, Smarsh has established a Capture Mobile group within its Product team. Guy Levit, formerly TeleMessage CEO, will lead this team for all Smarsh Capture Mobile offerings, including TeleMessage products.

"As organizations become more mobile and the regulatory environment grows more intense, we have seen growing demand for easy-to-use, reliable, and effective compliance solutions for WhatsApp and other popular mobile channels," said Levit. "We are excited to be part of the industry leader Smarsh, and to help more firms across the globe solve their persistent and evolving mobile compliance challenges."

About Smarsh
Smarsh enables companies to transform oversight into foresight by surfacing business-critical signals in all their digital communications. Regulated organizations of all sizes rely upon the Smarsh portfolio of cloud-native digital communications capture, retention, and oversight solutions to help them identify regulatory and reputational risks within their communications data before those risks become fines or headlines.

Smarsh serves a global client base spanning the top banks in North America, Europe, and Asia, along with leading brokerage firms, insurers, and registered investment advisors and U.S. state and local government agencies. To discover more about the future of communications capture, archiving and oversight, visit www.smarsh.com.

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