Article
FTI Technology Helps Major National Bank Enhance Its Smarsh Deployment to Deliver Cross-Functional Single Source of Truth for Communications Data
After implementing Smarsh to archive all communications, a major national bank needed access across multiple end-user teams and functions, including legal, regulatory compliance and more. The bank engaged FTI Technology to provide access to this single source of communications data for a broader audience, thus enhancing the bank’s return on its initial technology implementation.
Situation
A major national bank completed an implementation of Smarsh as an enterprise-wide journaling platform, with the goal of providing a single source of truth for all electronic communications channels and other data artifacts across the organization, to support legal and compliance needs. The organisation later determined that data residing in the Smarsh platform was needed by multiple end-user teams and functions across the bank, including legal, investigations, disputes, regulatory compliance, privacy and customer rectifications.
While each end-user group had a slightly different set of requirements based on their unique business processes and supporting platforms, they had a common need to view and disclose communications data to audiences, including employees, customers, external regulators and legal bodies, in a readable and usable format.
To support this requirement, there was an identified need for a solution to convert Smarsh output data into an intermediate format to be viewed within the various platforms in use across the bank, including e-discovery and data privacy platforms.
Our Role
The bank turned to FTI Consulting’s Technology segment to develop a solution to meet these requirements. The implementation included:
- Focusing initially on Microsoft Teams chat data, with the capability to expand to other communications channels over time, including Bloomberg, Symphony and Reuters chat.
- Converting Smarsh XML data into an intermediate format compatible with all downstream platforms, including HTML (viewable in any web browser), PDF and RSMF (viewable in Relativity).
- Providing enhanced pre-processing to enrich the end-user experience, including: • De-cluttering to highlight important features and events • Intelligently parsing communications data based on context • Enriching metadata to enhance end-user review (e.g. filtering by active vs. inactive participants)
- Enhancing reviewing capabilities in line with target business processes, including:
- Presenting the data in close-to-native format (e.g. embedded images, videos, emojis)
- Leveraging enhanced metadata to interrogate the data (e.g. date range, participants, content)
- Providing sophisticated visualizations and analytics to spot features and anomalies (e.g. conceptual clusters, social network)
- Producing documents ready for disclosure (including slicing, redacting, Bates numbering and converting into production formats such as Concordance)
FTI Technology and the client created a solution leveraging two assets developed by FTI Technology for managing emerging data sources such as chat communications. These included:
- Augmenting FTI Technology’s Universal Messaging Platform (UMP) with the Smarsh message protocol to convert XML files into intermediate formats to be consumed by downstream platforms.
- As required, deploying FTI Technology’s bespoke plugin application to view chat messages within the target platforms to provide communications review capability within the existing workflow, and enabling enhanced message-level filtering and search capabilities.
Our Impact
The solution has impacted numerous stakeholder groups across the client’s organization who need access to communications data in order to perform their work and maintain compliance with varying obligations. The results delivered include:
- Efficiencies in collecting data derived from multiple communications channels from a single consolidated source.
- Efficiency of search, review, redaction and production, fully leveraging available functionality within the target platforms, thus transforming previous processes that were manual, inefficient, error-prone and not easily accessible to end users.
- Deployment within target timelines to quickly align to the organisation’s pivot from traditional email to chat as its dominant communication channel.
- Enhancement of the client’s original business case for Smarsh and its expected return on investment.