Your clients and customers message your team on WhatsApp. Sausalito Labs captures those business conversations from each employee's own phone and delivers them to your archive for regulatory and legal recordkeeping. No second phone, no new number, no new app. Personal conversations stay personal.
Landed in Lisbon. Can we move our call?
Of course. Thursday at 9am your time?
Perfect, thank you.
I'll send the agenda tonight.
| Name | Status | Last Capture | Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bob Davidson | 6/20/2026 | 22 | |
| Greg Hall | 6/20/2026 | 16 | |
| Steven Barnes | 6/20/2026 | 152 | |
| Terry Smith | 6/20/2026 | 16 |
Why WhatsApp is hard to archive
WhatsApp is one of the world's most widely used messaging apps, and for many clients, especially those who live or travel abroad, it is the default way to reach the people they do business with. That convenience is also the compliance problem.
Since 2016, every WhatsApp message, call and shared file has been end-to-end encrypted. Your carrier and your email archive can never see, read or index those conversations, so they can't be captured centrally the way email, social media and SMS texts traditionally were.
Since 2021, users can set chats to delete automatically after 24 hours, 7 days or 90 days, and turn that on by default for new chats. A record that deletes itself is a record your firm no longer has.
In the SEC's off-channel enforcement actions, WhatsApp is named alongside iMessage and Signal as an app regulated employees used on personal devices for business conversations that weren't preserved. Financial firms were first, but the same duty applies anywhere a chat may be needed for an audit, an investigation or a litigation hold.
Read SEC press release 2023-149 →If WhatsApp is how your clients want to communicate, you need to be on WhatsApp to respond, and those conversations need to be part of your books and records.
Sausalito Labs works with WhatsApp's own built-in functionality, so your team keeps using the WhatsApp app they already have. There's nothing to install on the phone and no change to how they message clients.
Create your Sausalito Labs session and choose the WhatsApp network.
Confirm the connection from WhatsApp natively on your phone.
Choose which contacts and groups to capture or ignore, using the filters below.
Capture filters
Phone number
Group name
Groups containing a number
eSIM number
Setup takes about three minutes, with no IT team needed.
What's captured
Feature | |
|---|---|
Phones | iPhone and Android |
One-to-one chats | Yes |
Group chats | Yes |
Photos and file attachments | Yes |
Emojis, Reactions, Stickers | Yes |
Voice messages | Yes |
Replies, Edits | Yes |
Disappearing and deleted messages (captured before they expire) | Yes |
WhatsApp Business accounts | Yes |
Selective capture filters | Phone number, group name, groups containing a number, eSIM number |
Delivered to | Smarsh, Global Relay, Mimecast, Microsoft Purview, your journaled mailbox or your own cloud storage |
Archive only what matches your rules, by phone number, group name, groups containing a number, or eSIM number.
Deliver to Smarsh, Global Relay, Mimecast, Microsoft Purview, your journaled mailbox, or your own cloud storage.
Review captured conversations in one place, with daily exports, session logs, alerts and notifications.
Add iMessage, Google Messages or Signal anytime, under the same capture rules.
No. Clients keep using WhatsApp exactly as they do today. Nothing changes on their side.
No. You choose what gets captured by phone number, group name, or groups that include a client's number. Everything else stays on your phone and out of the record archive.
Yes. You can capture a group chat by its group name, or capture any group chat that includes a specific client's number.
No. Sausalito Labs works with the phone and the WhatsApp number you already use, through WhatsApp's own built-in functionality. No second phone, no new number, no new app.
Yes. Sausalito Labs captures conversations from both the WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business apps.
Messages are archived as they arrive, so a copy reaches your record store even if the chat has a disappearing message timer turned on or the message is later deleted.
Sausalito Labs can send to any archive, including Smarsh, Global Relay, Mimecast, Microsoft Purview, your journaled mailbox, or your own cloud storage.
Any firm that needs a record of business chats, from a one-person practice to an enterprise. That includes investment advisers and broker-dealers under SEC and FINRA rules, and firms in banking, insurance, legal and other fields that keep conversations for regulators, audits or litigation.
Setup takes about three minutes. Keep your phone, your number and your clients' favorite app.
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