Smarsh

Smarsh is a private company headquartered in Portland, Oregon, that provides cloud-based archiving and compliance technology for electronic communications. The company's platform captures, archives, and supervises communications data — including email, instant messaging, social media, and mobile messaging — to help financial services firms and other regulated organizations meet recordkeeping and supervisory obligations imposed by regulators such as FINRA, the SEC, and FCA.

Smarsh's primary market is regulated industries, particularly broker-dealers, investment advisers, and banks, where compliance officers and legal teams need to retain and search large volumes of employee communications. The product addresses eDiscovery, supervisory review, and regulatory examination workflows. Smarsh sells primarily through direct enterprise sales, often on multi-year contracts. The company has grown in part through acquisitions, adding capabilities in mobile and voice communications archiving over the years.

Smarsh's flagship offering is its Connected Archive, a cloud-based platform that ingests communications from dozens of channels and makes them searchable and supervisable. The company also offers professional services around compliance program management. Over the years Smarsh acquired Actiance (2019), which significantly expanded its coverage of social media and collaboration-tool archiving, and acquired Digital Safe from Autonomy/HP to extend its data-capture capabilities.

Direct competitors in the communications compliance and archiving space include Global Relay, Veritas, and Mimecast (for the email archiving segment). The regulatory environment around electronic communications — particularly the 2022–2023 wave of SEC and CFTC enforcement actions against major banks for off-channel communications conducted over WhatsApp — has created strong tailwinds for archiving vendors like Smarsh, as firms rushed to deploy solutions covering messaging apps.