FINRA Rule 3110: Supervise Mobile Texts Without the Risk

Your advisors text clients. They always have, and now the phone is simply where business moves fastest. And FINRA Rule 3110 holds your firm responsible for supervising those conversations, wherever they happen.

So the question is not whether your people text about business. It is whether you can see and review what they send.

The short answer

FINRA Rule 3110 is the Supervision Rule. It requires every member firm to establish, maintain, and enforce a supervisory system reasonably designed to keep the firm compliant with securities laws, regulations, and FINRA rules, all documented in written supervisory procedures. Subsection 3110(b)(4) names review of correspondence and internal communications directly. In plain terms, if your people text about business, your firm must capture those messages and make them reviewable. You can read the rule itself on FINRA’s site.

A firm cannot supervise what it cannot see. So supervision starts with capture.

Why this gets quietly difficult

Here is the tension most firms feel. Supervision sounds like a policy problem, but it is really an adoption problem.

Naturally, people gravitate to the apps they already use. When a capture tool feels clumsy or foreign, a few users quietly route around it. They move a quick client question to their personal thread, just once, just to be helpful. Coverage erodes slowly, not through bad intent, but through ordinary human behavior.

But each off-channel message is a record your reviewers never see. And a supervisory system with blind spots is the exact gap Rule 3110 exists to close. The exposure does not come from a villain. It comes from a poor fit, then low adoption, then drift.

You can supervise mobile, and you do not have to ban it

Here is the good news. You do not have to choose between letting advisors text and meeting your 3110 obligations. We capture the channels your people actually use, and we make every message reviewable inside the workflow you already run.

We compliantly capture iMessage, Android and RCS, SMS, and WhatsApp, with no change to how people text. Blue bubbles, reactions, media, and attachments are all included. The only open question is which mix fits your firm, and a Solutions Team expert maps the right one with you on a quick call.

How supervision-ready capture works

The mechanic is deliberately simple, so it earns the adoption recordkeeping depends on.

We capture the message.

Native capture pulls in business texts across iMessage, Android, RCS, and WhatsApp Business and Messenger, including group chats, media, reactions, and edited or deleted messages. There is no third-party app changing the texting experience your advisors expect.

We convert it to email format.

Every captured message becomes an email-format record. The subject line flags the message type, iMessage, SMS, or WhatsApp, so supervision can be scoped to mobile in a single search. The To and From line shows the participant numbers, with the employee side enriched with their name and corporate email.

We deliver it to your archive.

This is the part competitors built on a single archive cannot match. We are archive-agnostic. We deliver captured messages into industry-leading archives like Intradyn, or any other you already run. Nothing to rip out, nothing to refit. Your reviewers supervise email and mobile together, in the same place, the same way they do today.

That enrichment matters for a 3110 workflow. Reviewers identify the employee side instantly and surface mobile alongside email, so review stays one process instead of two.

A few honest limits keep the picture accurate. Capture covers WhatsApp messages, media, and metadata, not calls placed inside the WhatsApp app. WhatsApp registration accepts major-carrier US cell numbers, and landlines for the Business App. VoIP and toll-free numbers cannot register. And where you need business-only coverage, selective and whitelist capture keeps personal messages private, which keeps adoption high and privacy intact.

Where Rule 3110 fits the wider rulebook

Supervision rarely travels alone. Rule 3110 is the supervision half of a one-two punch with recordkeeping.

FINRA Rule 4511 requires firms to make and preserve books and records, with a default retention of at least six years where no other period applies, in a format compliant with SEC standards ( See our guide to FINRA 4511 retention). Business texts are records like any business email. The rule text lives on FINRA’s site.

SEC Rule 17a-4 sets how those records are preserved (see our guide to capturing texts under SEC 17a-3 and 17a-4). The 2022 amendments modernized electronic recordkeeping, letting firms use a complete, time-stamped audit-trail system and produce records in a reasonably usable electronic format. The SEC’s own amendment guide explains the change, and the rule text carries the detail.

Together they make the point plain. Supervise the communication under 3110, and preserve it under 4511 and 17a-4. Both depend on capturing the message first.

The urgency here is real, and it is worth stating calmly. Since 2021, regulators have charged more than 100 firms and collected over $3 billion in penalties for recordkeeping failures tied to off-channel communications. In one action in August 2024, the SEC charged 26 firms with more than $390 million in combined penalties, detailed in its press release. Notably, regulators have pointed to firm-approved, captured messaging as the remedy. The lesson is not to ban mobile. It is to capture it properly.

The bottom line

Before, business texts lived on advisors’ phones, out of reach of your reviewers, and out of step with Rule 3110. After, every business message across iMessage, Android, and WhatsApp is captured, enriched, and delivered into the archive you already trust, so supervision becomes one clean workflow.

You keep your archive. Your advisors keep texting the way clients expect. And your firm finally creates and preserves the records it is responsible for. Capture runs about a third the cost of an iPhone, and the fit is the only thing left to map.

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This article is general information and education only, not legal or compliance advice. FINRA and SEC requirements change, and how they apply depends on your firm and situation. Confirm current obligations with your own qualified compliance or legal counsel and the primary regulations before you act.