Compliance Newsbriefs: September SIA Conferences on Soft Dollars and Mutual Fund Reform, and more

September SIA Conferences on Soft Dollars and Mutual Fund Reform

SIA's Soft Dollars and Institutional Brokerage Conference, "Industry Challenges and Regulatory Uncertainty," will take place September 19 in New York. This event targets individuals responsible for buy-side and sell-side trading, institutional sales, research, investment management, legal and compliance, strategic planning, and business development. Discussion topics will include: bundled commissions and services; disclosure and transparency; Section 28(e); FSA Consultation Paper 05/5; proprietary and third-party research; execution costs; a regulatory update; an industry impact analysis; and, legal and compliance issues. Additional details will be available online at: https://www.sia.com/softdollars05/html/welcome.html.

SIA's Mutual Fund Reform Conference, which will be held September 23 in New York, will focus on how the events of the last three years have reshaped the marketplace from the regulatory, compliance, sales, and operations perspectives. Industry experts will provide insight on these subjects and identify other future changes. Discussion topics: the new regulatory framework; broker-dealer operational issues; conflicts of interest; mutual-fund sales implications; fund distribution; break point and net asset value transfer issues; and, point-of-sale disclosure and transparency. More details will be posted online shortly at: https://www.sia.com/mfr2005/.

AppRiver Launches SecureTide E-Mail Management Service

Gulf breeze, Fla-based AppRiver has launched SecureTide, its latest e-mail management service, designed to address the needs of businesses that increasingly are concerned about productivity, corporate privacy, legal liability and bandwidth consumption. Its Web-based tools enable tracking of key words and phrases in all addresses, headers, subject lines and message bodies, permitting identified e-mails to be blocked or redirected to ensure corporate security and policy compliance. The tools also give users the flexibility to ban unwanted file attachments from the network, such as .exe, .wav, .jpeg or .mp3, and to prohibit all messages containing specific phrases or those originating from countries specified by the administrator. Businesses can apply the tools to all incoming e-mail and, as an optional extra, to all outgoing email as well. Other enhancements to SecureTide include the addition of LDAP Mirroring, which eliminates the need to update e-mail server address changes manually, as well as a new SpamLab.net troubleshooting site for users. At the heart of AppRiver's service is the company's proprietary Spam detection system that utilizes more than 60 types of filtering techniques. In addition to spam identification analytics, AppRiver employs multiple antivirus engines and proprietary detection systems that rid incoming e-mail of worms, viruses, phishing attempts and other protocol-based vulnerabilities. The AppRiver service also provides perimeter security that conceals the user's message infrastructure to protect from a myriad of attacks, including Denial of Service (DOS) and Directory Harvesting. "AppRiver designed SecureTide for more-effective defense against unwanted e-mail as well as greater flexibility and control in how businesses manage their e-mail," said Joel Smith, AppRiver cofounder and chief technology officer, in the press release. "SecureTide integrates complete command and control into a system that's incredibly easy to use and affordable enough for all businesses, large or small." SecureTide is free for all new and existing AppRiver customers. Typical AppRiver service pricing for a company with 50 users is less than $675/year.