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In September 2017, a West Coast financial firm was fined $35,000 by FINRA. It was found that the firm failed to maintain documentation or review the websites maintained by the firm’s registered representatives. (read full report) Are you responsible for monitoring your registered representatives’ websites and online presence? It can become a daunting and time-consuming task. SiteQuest Technologies brings you years of experience when it comes to web monitoring, archiving, and website analysis. SQWatcher is our second product in this category and we have added cutting-edge technology that makes it even easier for you to keep track of what’s going on with your website(s). SQWatcher is configured with specialized “watchers” that look for the types of website changes you want to review. This technology offers a lot of flexibility allowing SQWatcher to adapt to your needs. Our archiving feature backs-up your website(s) daily so that you have a running history to help you quickly and easily respond to a regulator when audited. In addition, this West Coast firm was also fined for “failure to establish a policy or system for approval, for their registered representatives’ business social media accounts, and did not review, approve, supervise, or retain any of the social media accounts maintained by registered representatives for securities-related business purposes.” “failure to establish a policy or system for approval, for their registered representatives’ business social media accounts, and did not review, approve, supervise, or retain any of the social media accounts maintained by registered representatives for securities-related business purposes.” Our Eagle Eye program will help you quickly identify any social media accounts that your registered representatives own. Allowing your firm to take action and comply with FINRA requirements. The system's automated documentation and screenshots of your findings will help you respond to a regulator. Don’t let the time constraints of monitoring and documenting your advisor sites and web presence open you up to fines and the associated internal and external costs of a FINRA investigation like the one received by this firm. The cost of our Eagle Eye and SQWatcher programs are significantly smaller. Save time and money while protecting your firm from preventable fines. Our Eagle Eye and SQWatcher programs have two separate purposes, but working together they become a force multiplier in aiding our clients with their responsibilities. Contact us today for your personalized demo. We will help match our programs to your needs. Source: FINRA Case #2013034981501 Each January we like to look back at our growth and progress from the previous year, as we plan for the future and work diligently to make sure that we are meeting our client's needs and expectations. 2017 was a record-breaking year for SiteQuest Technologies.
During 2017, Eagle Eye celebrated its 4th year as one of our premier programs. Our first ever Eagle Eye client still utilizes this product and loves the ease and convenience of this program. More and more clients are discovering Eagle Eye and adding it to their firm’s resources. We doubled the number of individuals Eagle Eye monitored in 2017, resulting in over 122 million scans of the web. Our SQWatcher program had several updates making this program an even greater resource for our clients. SQWatcher is WORM compliant when it comes to storage. We have added YouTube channel monitoring and archiving to this program as well. We also improved the bulk discarding/archiving options in the SQWatcher workflow. We increased our client base by 25% in 2017, and this has made our team here at SiteQuest Technologies eager for 2018. We look forward to increased client interactions and helping with the challenges that a new year brings. Thank you for being part of this great growth. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out to me personally. I look forward to another great year of continued development and expansion for SiteQuest Technologies. James Cella President james@sitequesttech.com The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google search results
How often to you look at page two when you search for something on the web? Statistics have shown that as many as 91% of "Googlers" never go past the first page of Google when performing a search. With stats like that, page two or beyond can be a great place to hide, and considering the size of the web, an advisor's web presence can be easily buried deep in the search results presented by Bing or Google. Case in point. If you were to search for my name, "James Cella", just one of the top ten results (page one of Google) are positive hits for me. The others? Those are the other "James Cella's" in this world. You know, the one that's a hollywood producer, a singer in Europe, and a lawyer in New York. Yeah, those guys. So maybe the saying is true. You can hide a dead body on page 2 of Google. On the flip side, Eagle Eye correctly identified me (James Cella) correctly ten out of the first ten results found by system. That's 100% accuracy in this case and a huge improvement on Google's 10% accuracy mentioned above. If you wanted to go even deeper, every result in the top 30 result is a positive hit for me in Eagle Eye and if you were to look at the top 50, only 4 results were false positives. Those are staggering numbers compared to what we have found on Google or Bing. So even though one can hide a dead body or more realistically an outside business activity, an undisclosed social media account, website or blog on page two (or beyond) on Google, one can't easily hide them from Eagle Eye. A firm was recently fined $150,000 by FINRA for not monitoring their registered representatives’ use of social media sites. Additionally, this same firm did not have a mechanism for determining whether its representatives were using social media for securities-business purposes. (full case details)
The social media monitoring applications available today rely on an honor system. Companies must trust that their employees are reporting all the social media accounts with which they maintain and contribute. Unfortunately, there is a flaw in this system, not all representatives are so forthcoming with their social media accounts. When it comes to social media how do you know that you are monitoring all of your reps’ accounts? Our Eagle Eye clients are continually finding social media accounts that have not been reported, as well as identifying other things like undisclosed OBA’s, websites, and blogs. Eagle Eye's multi-query processes and dynamically designed algorithms provide more accurate results when monitoring the web. Eagle Eye saves time by eliminating the process of sifting through endless pages on Google or Bing when you are trying to monitor your advisors by hand. (Schedule a demo and we can show you in person how it will work for you.) One of our clients found after implementing Eagle Eye, they immediately identified several OBAs and many missing social media accounts that their reps had failed to report. Now after utilizing Eagle Eye for the last couple of years, not only are they able to continually monitor their reps for new issues, but their reps have become more forthcoming about reporting their OBAs and social media usage. Eagle Eye is just a fraction of the cost of a FINRA fine, and it was developed because of the feedback and requests that SiteQuest Technologies received from our clients. Not only does Eagle Eye identify and locate your representatives’ online presence but it also helps you document and report on your findings. With just a click, you will have everything you need including when a result was found, who reviewed it, comments that were made and time stamps on every action taken on the account. Make sure that you are not missing anything that you are required to monitor. Contact us today for a demo! A company from Virginia was recently expelled from FINRA membership earlier this year for several violations. Some of the FINRA findings included; “That the firm included issuer communications on its website that it knew or had reason to know contained untrue statements of material facts or were otherwise false or misleading.” If a claim is filed against your company for posting statements on your website that the claimant said is misleading or untrue, are you able to defend your company? Do you have the documentation and reports to support your response? Our SQWatcher application is a web-based tool that not only archives your website, but also analyzes it each day. SQWatcher creates readily accessible backup files that can be easily retrieved to immediately identify and fix something that could have gone wrong. It’s also important to note that unlike other archival systems that may only take a screenshot to show you what the website “looked like” in the past, SQWatcher collects the actual HTML code for every page on your clients’ website(s). This provides the ability to not only view the page in question, but also browse the rest of the site as it appeared in the past as part of your review process. Are you responsible for monitoring one or more websites for your company? This can become a daunting task for any financial supervisor with the continual changes and updates. Are you notified when website information is updated so that you can review and ensure that the changes made online are correct? SQWatcher has taken this into account so that you are automatically notified. This same Virginia firm was also cited by FINRA for “not reasonably supervising its activities of those of its associated persons.” Our Eagle Eye product is the first of its kind application that is designed specifically to help the financial industry easily and effectively supervise the web. Eagle Eye automatically searches, documents, and reports on your web supervision responsibilities so you have everything you need to find and address issues before they are brought to your attention by a regulator.
Eagle Eye and SQWatcher working together are a force multiplier in your supervisory scheme. The cost of these applications are just a fraction of the cost a fine. Working in the finance industry for over 15 years SiteQuest Technologies is an innovative partnership for your firm. We work closely with your supervision departments making sure that our products are continually evolving and optimized with your concerns in mind. Contact us today to see how we can assist you in your web supervision needs. |
About James CellaJames Cella is the President of a growing and innovative compliance technology provider called SiteQuest Technologies. James is a customer-centric individual and focuses on building and sustaining positive and lasting relationship with his clients and partners. James and his family are "super fans" of Utah Football and have attended nearly every home game since 2002. Go Utes! Archives
July 2019
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3/5/2018