Smarsh acquires Digital Reasoning
By FF Newsroom · 10 November 2020
Smarsh®, enabling organizations to manage risk and uncover value within their electronic communications, announced the acquisition of Digital Reasoning, a global leader in natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), at the 2020 FINRA Artificial Intelligence Virtual Conference. The transaction brings together the leadership of Smarsh in digital communications content capture, archiving, supervision and e-discovery, with Digital Reasoning’s leadership in advanced AI/ML powered analytics. The combined company will enable customers to spot risks before they happen, maximize the scalability of supervision teams, and uncover strategic insights from large volumes of data in real-time.
Smarsh manages over 3 billion messages daily across email, social media, mobile/text messaging, instant messaging and collaboration, web, and voice channels. The company has unparalleled expertise in serving global financial institutions and US-based wealth management firms across both the broker-dealer and registered investment adviser (RIA) segments. Smarsh has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA) since 2015. The report evaluates vendors on their completeness of vision and ability to execute, and in the 2020 edition, Smarsh was placed highest in ability to execute and positioned furthest in completeness of vision.1
Brian Cramer, CEO of Smarsh, said, “Smarsh and Digital Reasoning’s combined capabilities equip customers with an entirely new expertise that we are calling ‘Communications Intelligence.’ Using artificial intelligence and machine learning helps firms more efficiently supervise and mitigate risk at scale, and will now enable them to analyze their electronic communications to uncover business intelligence that can fuel sales and other revenue drivers.
Mr. Cramer continued, “The ongoing pandemic and its impact on how and where people work has accelerated long-term trends that were already well underway. The exploding volume, velocity, and variety of electronic communications are creating greater risks for firms, while also presenting opportunities to leverage communications data to spot risks before they happen, and identify new insights to drive fresh growth initiatives. These conditions are creating a large divide between firms investing to harvest data-driven insights and leverage data to manage risk, and those who are falling behind. This will bear out in earnings and share prices in the years to come."
Tim Estes, Founder and CEO of Digital Reasoning, said, “In this new world of remote work, a company’s digital communications infrastructure is now the most essential one for it to function and thrive. Smarsh and Digital Reasoning provide the only validated and complete solution for companies to understand what is being said in any digital channel and in any language. This enables them to quickly identify things like fraud, racism, discrimination, sexual harassment, and other misconduct that can create substantial compliance risk.”
The combined capabilities of Smarsh and Digital Reasoning enable customers to:
- Strengthen lexicon-driven supervision with AI-powered surveillance across the widest breadth of digital communications channels
- Automate surveillance across the emerging collaboration tools (such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, and Workplace by Facebook) that are critical for productivity in the COVID-era remote workforce reality
- Reduce costs of human capital, by minimizing the amount of communications people must review
- Accelerate the ability to leverage massive amounts of data for insights that can drive business growth
- Identify troublesome patterns or trends of employee behavior before they cause irreparable harm