Financial Services

mindSHIFT provides financial services firms with a host of services that enable you to have positive outcomes from SEC audits and meet various regulatory requirements.

Compliant Messaging Service

Combining a complete understanding of financial services regulations with expertise in delivering managed messaging solutions, mindSHIFT has engineered the premier compliant messaging solution. The compliance offering is a fully inclusive, turnkey solution with a predictable monthly fee that requires no investment in hardware, software or local data management.

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Persistent Chat Communities

mindSHIFT Technologies and Parlano, Inc. offer financial services organizations and their trading partners the industry’s first and only persistent group chat as a hosted solution. This solution is the only hosted enterprise Instant Messaging (IM) with persistent group chat to include

  • logging of chat and IM communications
  • the options of integrated shipment, archival, surveillance, and discovery of those communications

Benefits and Features

Designated Third-Party (D3P) Provider Service

As a designated 3rd-party (D3P) provider, mindSHIFT satisfies the recordkeeping requirements of Rule 17a-4 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Rule 17a-4 requires broker-dealers to establish a relationship with a third-party provider that can independently provide the SEC (and other regulatory bodies) with access to the broker-dealer’s records upon request.

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Persistent Chat Communities

Benefits

One of the most exciting communications mediums since email, persistent group chat is increasingly a must-have for financial institutions. mindSHIFT’s solution fully meets the needs of any financial services company, regardless of size or which regulatory authority it falls under.

  • Organize persistent dialogue around business-critical topics
  • Securely connect your business to your extended enterprise
  • Extend collaboration between people and systems, scaling to thousands of people
  • Broaden knowledge management enterprise-wide

Capabilities

  • Persistent group chat without IT infrastructure. The combined solution gives customers persistent group chat - including user management and provisioning, desktop client management and compliance management – without the need for IT infrastructure.
  • Trusted federation services. Organizations with MindAlign will be able to easily unite, or federate, their persistent group chat environments with other MindAlign deployments via hosted chat channels. This approach improves security, reduces IT effort, and ensures compliance management for both parties. In addition, organizations will be able to federate to partner organizations that don’t yet have MindAlign by enabling the partners to gain MindAlign access as a hosted service regardless of whether the partner organization uses MindAlign internally.
  • Financial industry chat channels. Via public channels, professionals from different financial institutions can gather and communicate in a secure and compliant way.
  • Integration services. mindSHIFT can create and deploy custom bots or agents that import research and other information to selected MindAlign channels. Application license management services further relieve the IT burden.

The technology includes Parlano MindAlign™, which is built for Microsoft® Live Communications Server (LCS) and provides federated, persistent group chat capability that lets customers, partners and suppliers build secure communities.

mindSHIFT, an expert in SEC-compliant messaging, performs the hosting for MindAlign and LCS, with the option of fully managed SEC, NASD and other compliance services. mindSHIFT’s services help customers deploy business-class chat channels quickly, easily, affordably and securely.

Users can follow and participate in hundreds of ongoing conversations even when they are not always online. The result is more effective and productive group dialogue between cross-functional and cross-organizational teams.

mindSHIFT offers one of the strongest available products for hosted messaging, archiving and discovery for electronic communications – services that relieve the burden on financial services’ IT and compliance organizations. mindSHIFT’s hosted messaging solutions include all the requirements of a comprehensive compliance solution, including management, surveillance, archival, discovery and protection of messages. mindSHIFT solutions, which scale from broker-dealers and financial firms to the largest enterprises, also allow organizations who desire to run their own messaging infrastructure to properly authenticate against their own directory systems and securely connect to this new managed service.

Features

The new hosted group chat solution boasts a comprehensive set of features and services, including:

  • A user management and provisioning portal. mindSHIFT will provide a portal for organizations to manage user identities on the mindSHIFT servers. With hosted federation based on the Microsoft LCS, mindSHIFT eliminates security concerns about external access since federated users won’t need to exist in other organizations’ enterprise directories.
  • Multiparty compliance distribution and management. mindSHIFT will handle all aspects of compliance for all interested parties and distribute compliance logs in their desired format.
  • Channel administration portal. mindSHIFT will make it easy for organizations to manage and create channels and finely regulate access to them.
  • Client configuration service. Customers can offload provisioning, deployment and support of third-party desktops to mindSHIFT.
  • Defined service-level agreements. Binding service-level agreements will reduce internal IT risk and enable customers to be confident about performance.

mindSHIFT D3P Services

To fully comply with SEC Rule 17a-4, broker-dealers must establish a relationship with a third-party provider that can independently provide the SEC (and other regulatory bodies) with access to the broker-dealer’s records upon request. This designated third-party requirement ensures that the broker-dealer’s records are accessible to securities regulators.

As a designated 3rd-party (D3P) provider, mindSHIFT satisfies the recordkeeping requirements of Rule 17a-4 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934:

  • The filing of a letter of undertaking with the Designated Examining Authority(s) (DEA)
  • The download of and access to any records requested by the SEC or NASD on an appropriate electronic storage medium
  • Regular testing and documentation of records access
  • Optional availability of 17a-4 compliant media

With mindSHIFT’s D3P service, you receive:

  • Documentation
  • Full and complete confidentiality
  • Submission of undertaking agreement to the client’s Designated Examining Authority
  • An experienced and unobtrusive team dedicated to client’s compliance needs regarding electronic communications and data archiving
  • Two audit reports per year to confirm compliance
  • Optional archiving (storage and indexing) of all email and instant message records onto non-erasable and non-rewriteable media
  • Optional surveillance solution to enable monitoring of electronic communications
  • Optional discovery solution which enables legal staff to review relevant information requested in a litigation situation

Benefits of mindSHIFT’s D3P Service include the assurance of full compliance with SEC 17a-4, and the technical and regulatory know-how providing the least disruptive solution to meet your firm’s specific needs.

For more information, call mindSHIFT at 877-227-5054 or write to us: info@mindSHIFT.com.