I read a short article in InvestmentNews today about a new social web site, LinkedFA, which is promoting itself as the “first and only Finra-compliant social networking site for financial professionals.” I immediately thought to myself, how can a social networking site tout itself as Finra-compliant when Finra hasn’t released its compliance guidelines yet? Finra postponed its introductory webinar until March.
Then I asked myself the larger question; why would financial professionals want a ‘walled-garden’ social media site in the first place? Doesn’t that kind of defeat the objective? If you’re a financial advisor, don’t you want to be where your prospects are? A site dedicated to financial professionals is fine for connecting with people within your industry but it doesn’t help you reach new customers.
Consider that there are currently more than 250 million Facebook users, 30 million Twitter users, and 25 million executives on LinkedIn. That’s where the conversations are taking place. That’s where you can reach customers and prospects.
Isn’t it better to participate in this larger, open conversation taking place on the Web and develop best practices, with the help of technology, to make sure that those conversations are appropriately logged and accounted for? That’s the best way to assure compliance, whether it’s for Finra, the SEC, or some other regulatory agency.
Our financial services customers rely on FaceTime’s IMAuditor and Unified Security Gateway to not only secure their networks, but to manage and log content for regulatory compliance.
That way they get the best of all worlds:
1) centralized control of online conversations stored on their own servers so they can be audited for compliance;
2) the ability to support any public social media site in a secure manner and
3) the ability to allow their traders and other employees to use the application that is best suited to the job, whether that’s Yahoo, Reuters, YellowJacket, Facebook or Twitter – we don’t mind, because, well, we support them all.
My team have put together a 30 minute briefing on “What you can stand to gain and lose with Social Media” – why not join them on January 27th at either 10 eastern or 10 pacific?
