As the markets continue to seesaw, responding to opportunities and ensuring absolute accuracy is a requirement that cannot be toyed with for any company in the sector. Local trader, Afrifocus, has turned to Mimecast Unified Email Management (UEM) to guarantee both compliance and continuity.
With over 200 000 trades and trade volumes of close to 2 billion shares for the past six months, the legislative and operational requirements were extraordinary.
“The industry that we are in is possibly the most complex when it comes to compliance and legislation. Most of our trade instructions come via e-mail and are time critical. Downtime was just not an option,” explains Moosa Kotwal, IT Manager at Afrifocus.
Off-site archiving and how it is done affects the chain of custody when working with electronic evidence. Mimecast's system is compliant with FAIS [1] requirements. The way the data is stored ensures the integrity of the mail is retained and that it be can be used as supporting evidence should it be needed. In the financial services industry, where the timing of an instruction from a client can mean the difference between a profit and a loss, the integrity of e-mail evidence is vital.
“The cost of archiving and storage alone was a headache, but add to this the costs of skills transfer and maintenance and it's clear that we were facing a business operations nightmare before we turned to Mimecast,” says Kotwal.
Mimecast UEM is a software as a service (SaaS) offering that gives clients complete carrier-class infrastructure without them needing to spend a cent on equipment or software. According to IDC, increasingly complex messaging requirements, characterised by worldwide regulatory, compliance and archiving issues in addition to longstanding security concerns, are driving the adoption of holistic e-mail management “from the cloud”. Our systems are designed to offer customers end-to-end solutions for managing e-mail through its entire life cycle, adds Garth Wittles, MD of Mimecast SA.
The understandable crackdown on compliance in the financial industry means that e-mails have to be archived before they are opened. The encryption and security requirements are also onerous, and Kotwal says the Mimecast UEM solution solved all of his problems without the hardware, maintenance and skills costs. Since governance, risk management and compliance are intrinsically linked organisations are looking for solutions that integrate the policy enforcement, hygiene, retention and discovery issues related to e-mail.
Afrifocus can also now tag certain documents as confidential, ensuring failsafe corporate security and compliance to JSE regulations.
“The ever-increasing regulatory and legislative burdens on financial companies have made this one of the most challenging environments to operate in. Our relationship with Afrifocus has allowed Mimecast to test its mettle. We are thrilled that Afrifocus has not only successfully solved its compliance, security and continuity requirements, but that they are working with us to fully realise other benefits of Mimecast UEM, such as the marketing and content filtering offerings,” concludes Garth Wittles, MD of Mimecast South Africa.
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