Recently the Division of Securities, Utah Department of Commerce fined two credit unions and a licensed broker-dealer for failing to supervise the advisors working within the credit unions. (read the full report)

These credit unions are not registered broker-dealers or investment advisors. They entered into a networking agreement with a third-party broker-dealer to provide securities brokerage services to their credit union customers through registered representatives. In this case, the parties involved were not closely monitoring the actions and communications of these advisors with regards to how the advisors and the credit unions branded these services. The “lines were being blurred” and it was not clearly disclosed that these advisors worked for the third-party investment service provider, and not for the credit unions.

The emails, marketing materials, communications in print and electronic were not being supervised and in the view of the regulator, causing confusion with customers being misled. As a result, the broker-dealers and the credit unions were fined $750,000.

FINRA and the SEC are not the only regulatory agencies requiring firms to monitor their advisors. Each state has their own division of securities regulators.

Have you entered into a third-party agreement with another company to provide security brokerage services to their clients? Do you have advisors that are working in the facilities of these partners?

The biggest question of all is, “Are you sufficiently monitoring your advisors and their online presence?”

The use of our Eagle Eye application would have identified where the broker dealers’ presence was online such as social media, blogs, online articles, Yelp, YouTube and more, allowing you to review each URL. Our SQWatcher application would have alerted you to any changes on their websites ensuring that your supervision department could review and approve wording changes before they go live on the web.

We’d love to tell you more. Contact SiteQuest Technologies today to see how our applications can aid in your supervision responsibilities, saving you time and lowering your risk.

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.” 

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 ​

Websites are always changing, trending, and updating information about products, company and or your advisors. What happens when these sites aren’t hosted by one of your approved advisor website providers? Those “rogue sites” or “off the range sites” as they are often called, that are created directly by the advisor or by a provider outside of the industry. It then becomes your responsibility to monitor, identify, respond, and document everything that happens with that website as well as archiving it.
 
While there are various solutions out there that help monitor websites for changes, reviewing changes and finding the right kinds of changes have proven to be difficult. With SQWatcher, we took a completely different approach and put added focus on the types of content that comes into the workflow.
 
SQWatcher stands for SiteQuest Watcher and our “Watcher” technology is behind everything that happens in the system. For every client, we create custom “watchers” that identify and isolate the types of changes they would like to review. As the application scans your website(s) throughout the day, it will analyze the changes that are found and determine if a review is required.
 
Additionally, we've learned over the years that advisor websites have many dynamic elements contained within them. These include stock tickers, date widgets, recent post sidebars, calendars, and more, all of which can change on a daily or near daily basis, often generating unwanted reviews. We’ve added a new technology that allows our clients to request “ignores” on these dynamic elements to limit unnecessary reviews. These adjustments allow the sites to be "tuned" over a very short period of time which limits the number and volume of reviews in a big way.
 
Finally, we’ve added powerful bulk review actions that in essence, allows a single review to apply to multiple pages. For example, if the system detected a change to the footer, that would generate hundreds of reviews in other systems, each requiring a separate review. With SQWatcher’s bulk review processes, this sort of change can be reviewed once and then applied across the remaining pages that reflect the same change, streamlining the review process like never before.
 
SiteQuest Technologies is proud of our long-standing tradition of listening to our customers’ needs within their job requirements. Our SQWatcher application was built with these customer requests in mind. We would love to take the time to personally show you how this application will work for your firm. Contact us today for your personalized demo.

​A company from Virginia was recently expelled from FINRA membership earlier this year for several violations. Some of the FINRA findings included;

​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.

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.
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Contact us today to see how we can assist you in your web supervision needs.