Compliance archiving isn’t difficult because of the regulations. It’s difficult because your employees don’t just use email anymore. They use WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, Bloomberg Chat, and dozens of other channels that legacy archiving platforms struggle to capture.
Comma captures business communications across 40+ platforms from the moment they’re sent, then preserves them in tamper-protected WORM storage designed for SEC Rule 17a-4 retention. When regulators ask, the archive is already complete.
Compliance archiving means capturing and preserving business communications in a form regulators can inspect. For broker-dealers and investment advisers, regulations including SEC Rule 17a-4, SEC Rule 17a-3, FINRA Rule 3110, and MiFID II require those records to be retained and produced on demand.
Legacy archivers struggle with these channels for a specific reason. Three things trip them up:
There is no compliance API to call
WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal don't expose a feed for archivers to pull from. Tools built around APIs simply can't see these channels, so they either skip them or ask your people to change apps.Sync-based capture leaves gaps
Archivers that copy from a backup or a periodic sync miss anything sent between cycles, and anything edited or deleted before the next pull. A gap in the record is a finding in an exam.The message lives on the device
Business conversations on personal phones never touch a server your archiver can reach. If capture doesn't happen on the channel itself, the record never exists.
Regulators worldwide are moving on off-channel messaging
In 2026 the UK's FCA reviewed 11 wholesale banks and found 178 internal policy breaches over off-channel communications, 41% of them involving directors or above.
Hong Kong's SFC has fined firms HK$10.85M for the same failures. Canada's CIRO has issued $10.3M. The enforcement playbook that started in the US is now global, and it lands on exactly the channels email archiving never touched.
Capture before messages disappear
Most mobile messaging platforms weren't designed for compliance. Messages can be edited, deleted, or live only on a device.
Comma captures business communications at the point they're delivered, before they can disappear, and writes them directly to your archive.
iMessage, WhatsApp, Gmail, Microsoft 365, Bloomberg Chat, and Signal
Source code for Signal and WhatsApp capture is public on GitHub. We cover the platforms your team actually uses, including the ones without public APIs.
Business conversations captured. Personal ones left alone.
Most archiving tools capture everything or nothing. Comma captures based on who someone is talking to: business contacts get archived, personal ones are left alone. No behavior change required, and personal messages are never stored.
Every message, indexed and ready for review
Timestamps, contact data, full message threads: all indexed from the moment of capture. Filter by platform, custodian, date range, policy match, or thread type.
When the exam comes, your archive is already organized.
WORM storage from day one
Every message Comma archives is stored in WORM (Write Once, Read Many) storage designed against SEC Rule 17a-4. No pre-exam scramble. The archive is already in the right format.
Frequently asked questions
What is compliance archiving?
Which regulations require compliance archiving?
Does compliance archiving cover WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal?
Are employees' personal messages archived?
What is WORM storage, and why does Rule 17a-4 reference it?
See how compliance archiving should work.
A 20-minute walkthrough: real capture across 40+ channels, real-time flagging, exam-ready exports.
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