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The client: A wealth advisory firm serving families and retirees
The client is a wealth advisory firm that employs 25 professionals serving high-net-worth families and retirees. Its advisors manage ongoing client relationships, with conversations continuing between scheduled financial reviews.
Text messaging accounted for over 70% of the firm’s client communication. Clients used text messages to arrange meetings, raise questions about their portfolios, and request updates during periods of market uncertainty.
For management, texting was an important part of client service. But advisors sent all client texts through native SMS apps using their personal numbers, outside the firm’s archiving and supervision systems.
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4. Your firm’s move away from off-channel texting starts with iPlum
The challenge: the firm could not reliably retrieve or review client texts
During an internal review, the firm and its compliance consultant examined how to retrieve messages related to specific client discussions.
The exercise exposed the following problems:
Reviewers had to request conversations from individual advisors
To examine a client exchange, the compliance consultant first had to contact the advisor involved. The advisor then searched their phone and supplied screenshots of the conversation.
If a screenshot began midway through a discussion or omitted a later reply, the consultant had to request more messages. Reviewing the exchange depended on the advisor’s availability and the material they provided.
Deleted messages left parts of the client history unavailable
Some older conversations had been deleted during phone upgrades. The firm had no separate archive from which to retrieve those messages.
And while an advisor could remember discussing a portfolio question, memory could not establish the exact wording or sequence of replies. As a result, the consultant could not fully examine discussions where the original messages were missing.
Preparing records consumed 40 hours per review cycle
Advisors and the compliance consultant spent more than 40 hours per review cycle collecting screenshots, locating older exchanges, and checking partial submissions.
The consultant had to arrange messages in order, associate them with the correct client, and identify missing portions before assessing the discussion itself.
For advisors, those requests meant time away from client appointments and financial reviews. For the consultant, they translated to more administrative work before the substantive review could begin.
The solution: move client texting to dedicated numbers with automatic message retention
The firm got iPlum to change where advisors sent client texts and how those conversations were preserved.
With iPlum, the firm could now:
Assign business numbers for client texting
The firm provided advisors with dedicated iPlum business numbers on their existing smartphones. Advisors used the iPlum app for client messages and reserved their personal numbers for private conversations.
The change also required clients to use the new numbers. Advisors shared their business contact details and directed future portfolio questions, meeting requests, and follow-up messages to those lines.
Preserve incoming and outgoing messages automatically
The firm used text archiving with WORM storage to preserve archived records in a non-rewriteable, non-erasable format, with up to 10 years of retention under the plan.
Incoming client texts and advisors’ replies via the business lines were automatically archived. Advisors did not need to select individual messages for preservation.
Review correspondence through the firm’s account
Authorized reviewers could use message records in the iPlum portal to examine correspondence associated with an advisor’s business line.
For a selected review period, they could open the message content and examine the client’s questions alongside the advisor’s replies. The original correspondence provided the material for assessing the discussion and identifying exchanges that required further investigation.
On top of that, the firm accessed iPlum's powerful technology, including:
- Shared lines to let authorized colleagues respond when an advisor was unavailable.
- Text signatures to automatically add the advisor’s name and firm details to outgoing messages.
- Broadcast texting to send general notices to clients as separate messages.
- Pinned conversations to place priority client discussions at the top of the message list.
- Mark as unread to mark client messages for a later response.
The results: client texting moved entirely to firm-owned numbers
30 days after adopting iPlum, the firm reported that advisors conducted all client texting through their assigned business numbers. As a result:
- Off-channel client texting decreased from 100% to 0%.
- Review preparation time dropped from more than 40 hours to 6 hours per cycle.
- Advisors and the compliance consultant saved more than 34 hours per review cycle.
Client conversations now formed part of the firm’s communication records rather than remaining on individual advisors’ personal phones.
In addition, reviewers could examine archived exchanges, while advisors spent less time gathering screenshots and locating messages for the consultant.
Your firm’s move away from off-channel texting starts with iPlum
If your advisors still use personal numbers to text clients, your firm could face the same difficulty retrieving those conversations for review.
iPlum gives advisors dedicated business numbers on their existing smartphones, with automatic text archiving and access for authorized reviewers.
Your clients can continue texting, while your firm retains the correspondence.
Get started with iPlum’s financial compliance line
