OpenPhone vs KrispCall for RIA Call Recordkeeping

Advisory firms are generally subject to books-and-records retention requirements that cover communications related to investment recommendations and advice, under rules that vary by whether the firm is state or SEC-registered. Confirm the specific retention period and format requirements that apply to your firm with your compliance counsel or chief compliance officer, since these details depend on registration status and can change. What matters operationally is that a client call about a recommendation isn't just a conversation, it's a record the firm may need to produce later, on a timeline it doesn't get to choose.

OpenPhone lets a firm centralize numbers under administration rather than tie them to an individual advisor's personal line, and keep call recordings and transcripts inside a workspace the firm controls, with visibility into who can access or export a given record. That matters most when an advisor leaves the firm: the calls, texts, and transcripts stay with the firm's records instead of walking out the door with the person who made them.

Most RIA practices serve domestic clients and don't need numbers across dozens of countries. KrispCall's signature strength, cheap international provisioning, solves a real problem for a sales team calling overseas prospects, but that's a different problem than the one most advisory firms actually have, which is proving a domestic client's advice-related calls are properly archived, not reaching more countries.

• Confirm with compliance counsel which communications, calls, texts, or both, fall under your firm's retention obligations.
• Require advisors to conduct client calls on firm-administered numbers, not personal cell phones.
• Set a process for capturing and archiving text messages if advisors text clients at all.
• Test producing a specific client's communications for a specific date range, and time how long it actually takes.
• Document what happens to an advisor's call and text history when they leave the firm, before the first real departure forces you to improvise.

Advisors sometimes assume a quick text to confirm a meeting time or answer a simple question falls outside recordkeeping obligations because it isn't a formal call. Whether a given text needs to be archived depends on its content and your firm's specific obligations, not on how casual it felt when it was sent. Confirm the scope with compliance counsel rather than making that call informally, advisor by advisor.

Say an examiner asks for every communication with a specific client over the past two years, including any call where a recommendation to rebalance the portfolio came up. If those calls happened on firm-administered numbers with transcripts attached to the client's record, compliance can pull the file, confirm what was discussed, and respond within the examiner's timeline. If the advisor handled most of that relationship on a personal cell phone, the firm may be unable to produce a complete record at all, which is a far worse position than any single missing call.

Firms that centralize call records before an exam ever happens spend that week confirming details. Firms that don't spend it explaining gaps.

Add phone number provisioning to the same onboarding checklist as system access and compliance training, rather than letting a new advisor default to using their personal cell until someone notices. Confirm the advisor's client-facing number is firm-administered from their first day, not their first quarter, since early client relationships are exactly the ones most likely to start on whatever phone happens to be convenient if nobody sets the expectation up front.

The same discipline applies when an advisor transitions book of business to a colleague, whether through planned succession or an unplanned departure. Confirm the receiving advisor has access to the prior call and text history before the transition date, not weeks afterward when a client calls expecting continuity and instead reaches a new advisor starting from a completely blank file with no history to work from.