Fathom vs Fireflies for RIAs: Recordkeeping-First Checklist

Investment advisers are subject to recordkeeping requirements under the Investment Advisers Act, and many firms layer their own retention and supervision policies on top of that baseline. Before evaluating either tool, confirm with your firm's chief compliance officer or outside compliance counsel exactly what your recordkeeping obligations require for client and prospect conversations, since requirements can vary by firm structure and by state.

• Does the vendor retain recordings and transcripts for at least as long as your firm's policy requires
• Can compliance export or produce records on request without depending on an individual advisor's own account
• Does the tool log who accessed a given transcript and when
• Can recordings be preserved even if an advisor later tries to delete one
• Does the vendor's own data handling meet your firm's third-party vendor review standard

An advisor liking how fast a summary appears after a call matters far less than the firm's compliance officer being able to answer yes to every item on this list. Run through the checklist with your compliance officer directly rather than having an advisor or ops person interpret it alone, since the answers often depend on contract terms a frontline user never sees.

Within whatever your firm's compliance policy allows, a solo advisor benefits from Fathom's speed for turning a client meeting into a quick follow-up summary. That convenience only matters once the underlying recordkeeping requirement is satisfied, so treat the workflow benefit as secondary to the compliance checklist above, not a reason to skip it. A sole practitioner is also, in most firm structures, their own compliance officer, which makes the discipline of checking the list above before adopting any tool even more important, not less.

A firm supervising multiple advisors benefits from a searchable, centrally accessible library that a compliance officer can review without depending on each advisor's individual account or goodwill. That centralized access is often the deciding factor for firms with more than a handful of advisors, independent of which tool summarizes a call more cleanly.

It also gives a firm a consistent way to spot-check advisor communications for supervision purposes, rather than relying entirely on advisors to self-report anything unusual from their own client conversations.

Get your compliance officer or outside compliance counsel to review the vendor's terms before any advisor uses it on a real client call, not after. Confirm the retention and access policy is documented in your firm's written supervisory procedures, and train advisors on what they can and cannot say informally, since a recorded call becomes part of the record, including any offhand comment about a strategy or performance expectation.

It's common for one advisor to start using a consumer-grade meeting tool because they like it, without realizing that firm-level compliance obligations apply the moment it's used on a client call. Once a compliance officer discovers this after the fact, the firm may have months of client meeting data sitting with a vendor that was never reviewed. Require compliance sign-off before any advisor uses either tool on a real client or prospect meeting, with no informal exceptions.

Only about 51% of SaaS account executives hit quota in a recent industry report, itself a marked decline from a decade earlier¹, and advisory sales performance faces its own version of that pressure, competing for prospect attention against other advisors and against a prospect's own inertia. A firm under pressure to grow assets under management can be tempted to move fast on tooling and slow on compliance review. Resist that order. A compliance violation costs far more than the weeks it takes to get a vendor properly reviewed.