The Digital Communications Landscape
The way financial institutions communicate has transformed dramatically over the past decade. What began as static web pages and one-way social posts has evolved into dynamic, interactive platforms that engage clients in real time. Banks, wealth management firms, and broker-dealers now use social media to publish thought leadership, share market updates, and interact with clients across channels.
But as digital communication expands, so do regulatory expectations. Regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) require firms to treat digital content—whether a website disclosure, tweet, or LinkedIn post—the same as traditional written correspondence. Every public communication related to business must be captured, retained, supervised, and made available for examination.
This guide explores why website and social media archiving are now essential components of compliance programs. It outlines the latest rules and expectations, common pitfalls, and how modern archiving technology helps financial institutions demonstrate compliance efficiently and defensibly.
SEC & FINRA Recordkeeping Rules for Online Communications
Financial institutions operate under strict recordkeeping and supervision rules that extend fully to digital channels. The key regulatory frameworks include:
SEC Rule 17a-3
Mandates that broker-dealers create and preserve accurate, current, and detailed records of their securities business, including communications on websites and social media.
SEC Rule 17a-4
Requires broker-dealers to preserve records—including electronic communications—in a non-rewritable, non-erasable format (WORM) for specific retention periods. It also mandates indexing and the ability to produce records promptly upon request.
FINRA Rule 4511
Requires firms to retain communications that relate to their business and ensures those records are preserved in accordance with SEC Rule 17a-4. The rule applies to digital content, such as website disclosures, advertisements, and social media posts.
FINRA Rule 3110 (Supervision)
Requires firms to establish and maintain supervisory systems that review and approve public communications before they are distributed. Supervision must be reasonable and documented, including evidence of review and escalation where needed.
FINRA Rule 2210 (Communications with the Public)
Governs the content of advertisements and public communications. Firms must ensure all digital content is fair, balanced, and not misleading—and maintain records showing how compliance was achieved. Firms are also responsible for ensuring that their representatives' use of social media complies with regulatory standards and are captured and archived for recordkeeping purposes.
SEC Guidance on Social Media Communications
The SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE) and Division of Enforcement emphasize that social media posts are advertisements subject to the same retention and content standards as other marketing materials. This includes LinkedIn posts, tweets, comments, and even reshares or likes if used in a business context.
👉 Learn more about SEC & FINRA Recordkeeping Rules here.
Why Digital Archiving Is Essential in Financial Services
The SEC & FINRA do not take recordkeeping rule violations lightly.
While meeting the stipulations of SEC & FINRA recordkeeping rules might seem like a daunting task, the cost of non-compliance can be significantly more burdensome. It's not just about the monetary penalties but the subsequent erosion of trust, potential loss of business, and the internal strain on your operations.
Here are some of the most pressing risks of non-compliance with recordkeeping requirements:
1. Fines & Sanctions
Non-compliance with the SEC's Rules 17a-3 and 17a-4 can have severe financial and reputational consequences for financial firms.
Fines can range from thousands to millions of dollars depending on the severity and duration of non-compliance. Over the last 5 years, enforcement actions have increased, and fines and penalties have averaged $5 billion dollars annually, in total.
As this astronomical sum suggests, non-compliance has meant extraordinary fines for financial services firms and banks. However, some of the most notable recent fines for non-compliance with recordkeeping regulations involve firms failing to preserve substantial majority of off-channel business communications including communications on personal devices and unapproved social media messaging platforms like WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal.
The failure to capture and preserve these records likely hindered the SEC investigations involving employees, including supervisors and executives. As such, and in addition to the financial penalty, non-compliant firms may also face suspensions or expulsion from securities exchanges, seriously jeopardizing their business operations.
2. Reputational Damage
But the damage of non-compliance isn't merely financial. The knock-on effect on your business reputation can be profound and long-lasting. Trust is vital in the financial industry. Clients want to know their money is in safe hands. The mere insinuation of non-compliance can lead to a loss of client trust, potentially resulting in a dwindling customer base and negative media attention.
3. Straining Resources
Moreover, dealing with non-compliance can strain your internal resources as well. It often requires a comprehensive internal audit, potentially necessitating additional staff or external consultants, not to mention the possible adoption and implementation of new systems to ensure future compliance.
All of this is to say, website and social media recordkeeping is essential for financial firms interested in avoiding huge fines. The heaviest fines that have been issued involve the inability to capture and retain tricky data sources like text messages, personal email accounts, and chat applications.
If you’re interested in avoiding the damaging effects of missing records, it is worth investigating recordkeeping technology that can help you capture records from dynamic data sources like text messages, enterprise collaboration platforms like Slack and MS Teams, social media, and website content. It could save you millions.
Website Archiving Requirements and Challenges
A firm’s website serves as its digital storefront and primary disclosure platform. It may include product information, fee schedules, market commentary, and investor resources. Under FINRA and SEC guidance, all of this content qualifies as advertising and must be retained.
Website Archiving Key Challenges
1. Dynamic content
Many modern websites use JavaScript, personalization, and embedded media that traditional backups can’t capture accurately.
2. Version tracking
Firms must demonstrate what clients saw at any given moment—a challenge when content changes frequently.
3. Third-party content
Embedded feeds, calculators, or partner widgets are part of the user experience and must be archived in context.
4. Accessibility
Firms must be able to produce authenticated, tamper-proof records quickly in the event of an audit or records request.
Regulatory Expectations
During an examination, firms may be asked to reproduce a historical version of their website exactly as it appeared on a specific date. A compliant website archive must therefore include:
- Full page content, layout, and design
- Linked documents and disclosures
- Embedded media and interactive elements
- Metadata & timestamps
- Hash values / digital signatures ensuring authenticity
Social Media Archiving Requirements and Challenges
Social media has become indispensable to modern client engagement. Advisors, compliance teams, and marketing departments all rely on platforms like LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and YouTube to build relationships and share insights.
Yet each post, comment, and reaction is subject to the same compliance standards as a printed brochure or email newsletter – records must be captured, preserved, and produced when necessary.
Social Media Archiving Key Challenges
1. Dynamic content
Modern social media has a variety of multimedia types, including text posts, videos, Reels, Stories, Gifs, and emojis, making capturing all of these content types in native formatting complicated.
2. Non-standardization
Social media platforms are not standardized and each has its own engagement framework and UI. This makes capture and indexing records across platforms particularly challenging.
3. Ephemeral Content
Posts, replies, and comments can be deleted as quickly as they appeared, making it incredibly difficult to keep complete records without any gaps. Some content even disappears by design, but is still subject to recordkeeping requirements.
4. Third-party data exports
Most social networking sites will allow you to download your data, but it is not complete, misses metadata, is not in native formatting, and would not meet any financial services recordkeeping requirements.
5. Accessibility
Firms must be able to produce authenticated, tamper-proof records quickly in the event of an audit or records request.
Regulatory Expectations
During an examination, firms may be asked to reproduce social media posts exactly as they appeared on a specific date. A compliant social media archive must therefore include:
- Full page, content, native layout, and design
- Linked documents, images, or multimedia content
- Embedded media and interactive elements
- Metadata & timestamps
- Hash values / digital signatures ensuring authenticity
Why Backups and Screenshots Aren’t Enough
Many firms still rely on manual processes or generic IT backups to retain website and social media content. Unfortunately, data exports or screenshots from your website or social media accounts simply do not cut it.
By the time you get around to screenshotting or backing up your data, content could be edited or deleted—leaving you with incomplete records and at risk of non-compliance.
Screenshots are easily manipulated and therefore not acceptable for capture or preservation of records. And forget trying to find specific records in a sea of screenshots and random data if you're trying to produce them for an audit. Accessibility means you have to be able to quickly find and access specific records, and produce them in a legible format. With screenshots and data dumps, this is nearly impossible.
And that's why social media and website archiving is so important for financial service providers.
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What Regulators Require
Regulators expect records that can be authenticated and reproduced in context. A compliant archive must:
- Capture both data and presentation (the look and feel).
- Have tamper-proof storage and ensure authenticity.
- Support search, supervision, and export functions for efficient review.
SEC & FINRA Compliant Archiving Technology
A compliant archiving platform should provide end-to-end assurance across capture, retention, supervision, and production. The most critical capabilities include:
1. Automation
Automation features that can automatically capture, categorize, index, and archive electronic communications, social media posts, websites, and other business records in real-time are going to save you time and resources, while reducing the risk of manual errors and non-compliance.
Automation can also ensure your records are retained for a set duration and disposed of as needed at the end of the retention period, without having to set manual reminders or dispose of the records.
2. Advanced Encryption and Security
To safeguard sensitive information from unauthorized access and cyber threats, compliant recordkeeping technologies must employ state-of-the-art encryption methods and robust security protocols. Making sure your technology meets the WORM (Write Once, Read Many) requirement ensures that all records are securely stored and protected against potential breaches, aligning with the SEC and FINRA’s rules.
Practically speaking, look for advanced encryption like 256-bit encryption and security certifications like ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC II Certifications.
3. Fidelity of Capture
Preserve websites and social media content in their original, interactive format—including videos, links, and comments—so reviewers can replay content exactly as it appeared.
4. Retention and Legal Hold
Records must be stored for mandated retention periods and safeguarded from deletion or alteration. Legal hold functionality ensures relevant data remains preserved during investigations or litigation.
5. Supervision and Review
Supervisory workflows allow compliance officers to review and approve content, leaving a clear audit-trail. Automated monitoring and keyword alerts can also flag potential policy violations for quick remediation.
6. Search and Retrieval
Records are required to be easily retrievable for examination and auditing purposes. Compliant technologies will facilitate quick and efficient retrieval of records with advanced indexing and search functions, including options to export in readable formats and compatible with auditors’ standard recordkeeping technology like WARC.
How Pagefreezer Helps Financial Firms With Compliant Website & Social Media Archiving
In this complex regulatory landscape, advanced recordkeeping technology is indispensable. Solutions like Pagefreezer offer a way to navigate these challenges effectively. Pagefreezer offers compliant archiving solutions for website, social media, and enterprise collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack.
Here are just a few of the ways Pagefreezer can help your firm stay compliant with SEC and FINRA recordkeeping requirements:
Automated Real-Time Capture and Archiving
Pagefreezer automates the capture of website, social media, and team messaging app platforms so none of your content is ever missed. This data is always accessible to users for browsing and export via our user-friendly dashboard.
Secure Data Archiving
Pagefreezer has achieved the SOC II Type 1 & Type 2 reports, as an attestation that our services comply with SOC’s standards for operational security. Our management system is also ISO 27001:2013 certified, meaning that we consistently meet the security goals outlined in ISO 27001. The data centers that we use are SOC 1, SOC 2, and ISO certified.
Easy, Authenticated Data Exports
The Pagefreezer dashboard allows administrators to export records in WARC, PDF, and CSV. All exports have the metadata, timestamps, and digital signatures needed to prove authenticity. Firms can also make use of a public access link to provide easy entrance into an entire archive for regulatory audits.
