Visionary Wealth Advisors helps safeguard mobile communications with Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management and CellTrust SL2

Be there for customers—and remain in compliance

Investment advisors play an essential role in their clients’ lives, so open lines of communication between advisors and their customers are incredibly valuable—not only for providing up-to-date financial planning services, but also for building and maintaining trust. However, in today’s technology-driven world, customers expect near-instant communication and have found one of the best ways to deliver that is via text messaging. Despite the speed and convenience of text messages, many people have let their guards down, assuming every conversation is secure and acting as if they are talking to their advisor face to face. This opens the doors for bad actors and also presents significant challenges from an archival and surveillance perspective because many advisors, especially those on contract, use their own devices.

The change in technology adoption created a focus shift towards cybersecurity and compliance at the same time as external pressures drove a push for industry-wide change around text message transparency. Advisors who texted with their clients were exposing their companies to serious penalties and fines because in accordance with the Investment Advisor Act, along with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), any written communication between contractors, clients, and employees must be checked. The Act also states that companies must monitor, capture, and retain messages in case of audits. Recently, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued heavy monetary penalties to companies that failed to comply.

The financial services company Visionary Wealth Advisors, which was established in 2014 and manages around USD2 billion in assets, faced the challenge of finding a security solution for its advisor-client communications that would work both on company-owned and employee-owned devices before any fines were issued, particularly with text messages still a gray area in communication compliance. “As the SEC began to shoot warning shots across the bow in this space, we realized very quickly we needed to have a comprehensive solution in place, not just for device ownership, but also to continue meeting our clients’ expectations in customer service,” says Ryan Barke, Chief Compliance Officer and General Counsel at Visionary Wealth Advisors. “In an industry like ours where we're managing billions of dollars, we certainly have an obligation to make sure that we're safeguarding both the customers' private assets and their private information.”

Above all, Visionary Wealth Advisors wanted a solution that would interoperate seamlessly with its existing Microsoft environment, including the Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance suite, which it uses to enforce communications policies and flag specific written communications for the compliance team to review. “We’re a Microsoft shop at Visionary Wealth Advisors, and we took great steps to become a Microsoft shop, so we want all our technology to integrate with each other,” explains Barke.

The search led Visionary Wealth Advisors to CellTrust and the CellTrust SL2 solution with embedded Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management, and it embarked on a security transformation journey to continue meeting customer needs while staying compliant with government and industry regulations.

Partnering with CellTrust to sort and secure text messages

Like Visionary Wealth Advisors, CellTrust—a growing technology company focused on securing mobile communication and collaboration— recognized the rapidly changing mobile communication practices and saw a gap in SMS security and compliance controls in most existing technology. CellTrust’s latest product, the CellTrust SL2 mobile communication platform, leverages a bring-your-own-device model to have text and voice conversations captured and sent to a compliant record retention point in Microsoft 365 to meet the archiving requirements for multiple regulations within the financial services industry.

“A central pain point is that the client doesn’t understand the regulatory environment that we operate in,” says Barke. “They just want to communicate with their financial advisor, and the financial advisor wants to communicate with the client. We can have a policy that says, ‘Advisors, you’re prohibited from text messaging with your clients,’ but we cannot control the other end of that communication.”

Adds Rebecca Ruegg-Lerner, General Counsel at CellTrust, “There has to be a solution for advisors to be able to keep up with texting and a way for those organizations to perform the surveillance and recordkeeping so that they can produce those records when different regulators, auditors, and commissions are looking for them.”

Visionary Wealth Advisors is now an early adopter of the CellTrust SL2 platform that offers highly secure data storage in Microsoft Azure and works with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management through the CellTrust SL2 Data Connector. In doing so, the firm has improved visibility of all its data and maximized security while staying ahead of the innovation curve.

The SL2 Data Connector imports mobile communications to designated user mailboxes in Microsoft 365. After message data is imported, Visionary Wealth Advisors can apply Microsoft Purview compliance features such as Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, Microsoft Purview records management, and Microsoft Purview communication compliance to meet all applicable government and regulatory policies.

Improving information retention, monitoring, and user experience

With Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management as the backbone for CellTrust SL2, Visionary Wealth Advisors has significantly boosted its eDiscovery, records management, and data pipeline capabilities and made compliance easier and faster. Not only can the organization better manage employees’ business-related communications across its eight locations, Visionary Wealth Advisors and its analysts, managers, and other employees can also retain and find specific messages to prepare for audits without significant disruption. “Most people are familiar with searching for a specific email, but if I wanted to say, ‘Give me any email that says buy this stock within four words or two lines of someone saying it’s a good deal,’ the system has great advanced search capability to find anything applicable,” shares Kevin Moshir, Chief Operating Officer and Cofounder of CellTrust.

Moving forward, Visionary Wealth Advisors can easily optimize records management and configure multiyear retention of Microsoft-based communications, including emails and Microsoft Teams messages, thereby controlling content through its entire life cycle. “What is really key is using Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management to access all the underlying metadata within multiple types of mobile communications,” says Ruegg-Lerner. “That helps Visionary Wealth Advisors make sure that they give complete and correct responses to any request from auditors or regulators.”

Using CellTrust SL2, the company can then provide more customized services to its employees and customers alongside new data privacy safeguards across multiple Microsoft products and services. “Our ability to create custom policies is practically infinite with the Microsoft suite,” says Barke. “We can apply one policy to all communications from senior-level employees, have our senior compliance analysts surveil those communications, and then peel off other groups for assignment to other analysts.”

Visionary Wealth Advisors has also used CellTrust SL2 to mirror the native text messaging experience on both iOS and Android devices, creating an intuitive experience that didn’t require hours of training. “Our employees have really adopted both the CellTrust and Microsoft technologies, which gives me great comfort,” says Barke.

Achieving a complete technology refresh

Prior to using Microsoft products and services, including the E5 Compliance suite, Visionary Wealth Advisors relied on a range of mismatched, siloed solutions, including Gmail, a third-party archival and compliance tool, Smarsh, and RedTail for customer relationship management. “We had all of these different à la carte options and the user experience from one to the other was not great for our advisors because they were having to learn three different sets of technology and it wasn’t dependable,” says Barke. “That was where we looked to bring everything together.”

Visionary Wealth Advisors chose CellTrust SL2 for its native interoperability with the company’s existing Microsoft environment and for features such as accepted compliance controls and device and carrier types. The company also uses CellTrust SL2 to keep personal and business communications separate on company-owned and employee-owned devices, and it is interested in adding desktop functionality for employees and administrative staff communicating with clients. “Those were the boxes that we wanted to check,” says Barke. “CellTrust SL2 alongside Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management either checked all of them or had a roadmap in place to check the box.”

With the organization also in the midst of a complete technology refresh, Visionary Wealth Advisors aimed to eliminate outages related to updates from multiple software applications and create long-term scalability with one vendor. Having already selected and having success with Microsoft, it moved company emails to Microsoft Exchange Server, joined its trading software with Microsoft Dynamics 365, and culminated the refresh by pulling in CellTrust SL2 with Microsoft Information Governance.

Sustaining critical lines of communication, covering more ground

Using Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management and CellTrust SL2, Visionary Wealth Advisors approaches communicating with customers via text in a new, policy-approved way. “Whether we’re sending reminders for appointments or answering quick questions that they have, our customers know that we truly are accessible in almost a second’s notice,” says Barke. “Our end customers get higher level touch from our advisors, and we have the ability to communicate with them more often and in more personal ways.”

Visionary Wealth Advisors isn’t just staying connected with its clients in more targeted and personalized ways—it’s doing so while remaining fully compliant, having added safeguards against fraudulent or inappropriate activity, and protecting confidential customer information. The financial planning and wealth management firm also saves time and money thanks to its streamlined view of conversation data and added surveillance controls. “Before SL2 and Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management, we had to use different applications in order to review the different sets of communication channels,” says Barke. “Now, we have that all bundled into one solution, so we cover larger swaths of material than we could previously.”

Rounding out its new infrastructure, CellTrust proved to be the perfect partner for advancing Visionary Wealth Advisors’ security strategy, particularly given that it’s also a Microsoft-first shop. “CellTrust has a great product now with CellTrust SL2, but they’re continually looking for new solutions and updating their product, including integrating with Dynamics 365, allowing us to pull messages into our customer relationship management software, and having a light version of the text message application so that we can send secure documents back and forth between our clients, which is a game-changer,” says Barke.

As part of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA), CellTrust has not only been able to provide accelerated speed to market, improved customer experience, and new revenue opportunities to the companies it works with, but benefit from those high-value opportunities itself. “One of the key pieces in helping our customers to feel comfortable with us is knowing that we use Microsoft to the extent that we do in order to help achieve that high level of security and maintain the privacy of their communications, documents, and information,” says Ruegg-Lerner.

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