Supervision and Discovery of Electronic Communications in the Financial Services Industry

We present a system called Galaxy that assists financial services companies in supervising electronic communications, searching electronic information archives to conduct internal investigations, and responding to legal discovery requests. Galaxy’s supervision component enables companies to implement electronic information screens, identify suspicious text patterns in electronic communications, and detect and prevent violations of policies and procedures, in compliance with applicable securities laws and self-regulatory organization rules. Galaxy’s discovery component supports in-depth internal investigations by allowing companies to search electronic information archives, focus their results along various search dimensions, and visualize relationships among entities. It also enables companies to compile responses to legal discovery requests for electronic information more efficiently. In this paper, we describe the architecture of Galaxy’s supervision and discovery components, illustrate the functionality these components using example scenarios from the financial services industry, and propose topics for future research.