SEC Rule 17a-4 (in combination with 17a-3) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 requires broker-dealers to create and preserve in an easily accessible manner, a comprehensive record of each securities transaction and their securities business in general.  These preserved records are used by the SEC to monitor compliance with applicable securities laws including antifraud provisions and financial responsibility standards.

 

To ensure compliance with SEC Rule 17a-4, broker-dealers must:

• Maintain and retain certain records for the required retention period
• Store the records in a manner that prevents them from being overwritten, erased or otherwise altered
• Have in place a system to show the audit trail of each record and provide verification that the records were not altered

Complying With SEC Rule 17a-4

Liquid Machines Document Control and Email Control help firms subject to SEC Rule 17a-4 achieve compliance by:

• Enabling the firm to define policies that automatically protect documents and prevent alteration
• Archiving email and automatically applying the appropriate retention policy based on the content, sender, or receiver 
• Encrypting information at all times at rest or in transit so protection and archiving policies cannot be changed or removed
• Providing detailed logs and audit trails of content access and usage in a format that can be easily stored, viewed and imported into other enterprise systems
• Providing logs of all email related actions and archiving
• Supporting compliance activities without changing the way users work.