NASD Says Instant Messages Must Be Saved

from the putting-the-burden-on-small-companies dept

As Wall Street continues to look for ways to clean up their image from the most recent scandals, the National Association of Securities Dealers has announced they're requiring firms to keep copies of all instant messaging communications for three years. As this other article points out, this will put a bigger burden on smaller firms that will need to go out and find a corporate IM system that can handle archiving, instead of using the free solutions. I also think that this will stifle the reasons why IM is useful. Since there's nothing at all like an IM standard, does this mean, if you want to talk to your broker, you're going to need to download yet another unique IM client? I understand the importance of keeping track of who speaks to whom (and possibly what they say), but anyone who wants to give out secret information is going to find a way to do it, whether over IM or elsewhere. All this does is create a headache for those in IT who not only need to figure out how to manage the archive, but also have to determine what corporate IM product to use and install. Sounds like a lot of work for very little benefits.