Compliance Laws - SEC Investment Advisers Act of 1940

SEC Investment Advisers Act of 1940
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently imposed new regulations on private investment pools, also known as hedge funds. In a three-to-two vote on Oct. 26, the SEC decided to require hedge fund managers with assets in excess of $25 million to register under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. The regulation went into effect on Feb. 1, 2006. The ruling requires that most hedge fund advisers register with the SEC under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, which includes provisions for securing, managing and archiving all electronic communication, including email and instant messages.

Regardless of whether hedge-fund managers are for or against the regulation, they still will have to evaluate their current processes and prepare for the coming deadline. Hedge-fund managers will also have to face many challenges around pricing.

Athena Archiver is an easy-to-use, fully secure solution for immediate compliance with SEC, Investment Advisers Act and NASD regulations with real-time search and discovery, supervision, and enforcement features.

• Archived messages must be stored in duplicate. One copy must be stored in an online archive, and a second copy must be stored offline on permanent, tamperproof media, such as Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) technology.
• Storage media must be verified automatically for quality and accuracy.
• Archived messages must be date/time-stamped and serialized. Each message must be assigned a unique, sequential identification number as a safeguard against deletion.
• A searchable index of all stored data must be maintained. Indexes must be retained on each unit of storage media for the messages and attachments stored on that unit.
• Messages and indexes must be easily retrievable and downloadable to other media as required by SEC regulators.

Athena Archiver helps Hedge Funds Organizations achieve compliance with the Investment Advisors Act of 1940 as it pertains to email and instant messages.

• Verify the integrity of the archive: as email comes into the system we time stamp, serialize and create a unique signature for each message.

• Allows companies to retain critical email for the required time period in a highly secure encrypted archive. We provide automatic verification of the quality and accuracy of the storage media recording process using CRC checks and cryptographic signatures.

• Ensures the integrity of an electronic message by encrypting it at all points during transmission and storage.

• Unlike some of our competitors, we disallow users and administrators from deleting emails from the archive. The ability to delete email from the archive will almost guarantee IA 1940 noncompliance.

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