Electronic Discovery & Supervision - Overview
Current regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) require improved technologies for monitoring and searching electronic communications in financial service companies. We present a solution called Galaxy that enables compliance with these regulations by providing automatic supervision and in-depth discovery of email, instant messages, and other electronic communications.
Galaxy greatly enhances the ability of financial service companies to supervise electronic communications, archive such communications and other contextual information, and conduct periodic internal investigations to detect violations of securities laws and regulations.
First, Galaxy's supervision component analyzes email, instant messages, and other electronic communications in real time to enforce company policies and detect potential violations. It allows compliance officers to generate powerful and flexible rules to detect suspicious text patterns in incoming and outgoing communications. Using these rules, companies can implement internal screening mechanisms to block information flows between employees with material insider information (e.g., investment bankers) and employees making investment decisions for the company or its clients (e.g., brokers). They can also screen particular employees from sending or receiving information that would create conflicts of interest. These screens can be temporary or permanent and can be adapted to accommodate changing corporate environments.
Second, Galaxy provides a pluggable infrastructure to extract contextual information from various sources. This information may include, for example, sender or receiver departments, distribution lists for pending projects, or lists of sensitive key words. Galaxy also provides mechanism to sample from archives of electronic communications to discover any new correlated terms. Galaxy's text analytics and supervision rules can incorporate this contextual information and the new vocabulary to improve the effectiveness of rule enforcement and the recall ratio.
Third, the supervision component can periodically analyze archives to detect non-obvious patterns and relationships that may signal potential violations, enabling companies to conduct periodic compliance reviews which can prevent and minimize any potential damage. Also, it can correlate external events such as public announcements with electronic communications to detect illegal activities such as insider trading. Furthermore, Galaxy's discovery component provides tools for analysts to drill down along various search dimensions and visualize relationships and social networks among senders and recipients to carry out in-depth investigations.
Electronic Discovery & Supervision - Presentations
Electronic Discovery & Supervision - Publications
Galaxy greatly enhances the ability of financial service companies to supervise electronic communications, archive such communications and other contextual information, and conduct periodic internal investigations to detect violations of securities laws and regulations.
First, Galaxy's supervision component analyzes email, instant messages, and other electronic communications in real time to enforce company policies and detect potential violations. It allows compliance officers to generate powerful and flexible rules to detect suspicious text patterns in incoming and outgoing communications. Using these rules, companies can implement internal screening mechanisms to block information flows between employees with material insider information (e.g., investment bankers) and employees making investment decisions for the company or its clients (e.g., brokers). They can also screen particular employees from sending or receiving information that would create conflicts of interest. These screens can be temporary or permanent and can be adapted to accommodate changing corporate environments.
Second, Galaxy provides a pluggable infrastructure to extract contextual information from various sources. This information may include, for example, sender or receiver departments, distribution lists for pending projects, or lists of sensitive key words. Galaxy also provides mechanism to sample from archives of electronic communications to discover any new correlated terms. Galaxy's text analytics and supervision rules can incorporate this contextual information and the new vocabulary to improve the effectiveness of rule enforcement and the recall ratio.
Third, the supervision component can periodically analyze archives to detect non-obvious patterns and relationships that may signal potential violations, enabling companies to conduct periodic compliance reviews which can prevent and minimize any potential damage. Also, it can correlate external events such as public announcements with electronic communications to detect illegal activities such as insider trading. Furthermore, Galaxy's discovery component provides tools for analysts to drill down along various search dimensions and visualize relationships and social networks among senders and recipients to carry out in-depth investigations.
Electronic Discovery & Supervision - Presentations
- "Galaxy: Supervision and Deep Discovery for Email Archives", Short Technology Overview.
- "Galaxy: Supervision and Discovery of Electronic Communications", Academy of Technology Security and Privacy Symposium. June 2007.
Electronic Discovery & Supervision - Publications
- Stefan Edlund, Tyrone Grandison, Joshua Hui, Christopher Johnson. "Supervision and Discovery of Electronic Communications in the Financial Services Industry". The Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Governance, Risk and Compliance - Applications in Information Systems. Montpellier, France. June, 2008.