Financial services organisations need a communications compliance recording solution that is both future-proofed and able to work with multiple formats. Not only will this mitigate huge risks but it will mean serious competitive advantage, according to Richard Mill, MD of Business Systems (UK) Ltd
Trust and credibility are central to the success of financial services organisations. Product mis-selling or unauthorised trading can destroy public trust and an organisation’s reputation overnight, not to mention dramatically denting its bottom line. To diminish the chances of such events actually happening, financial organisations must keep robust, thorough and immutable records of all their dealings and communications. Any voice recordings must be simple to find and easy to play back in the event of an audit or investigation.
This is an enormous challenge in itself for any organisation. Financial services organisations have amassed various solutions over time utilising very different call capture protocols, leaving them with disjointed data silos and records that are problematic to access. This can make it difficult to track down data in a timely manner. Data coherence across business operations is paramount to achieving common compliance goals.
At the same time, regulations are set to increase and become more burdensome. Knowing where your data is and being able to quickly access it will help you to speed up efficiencies and processes in the long run.
Accelerating response
In today’s litigious and strictly monitored market where financial organisations must adhere to MiFID II, KYC and so forth – and must be able to produce records at short notice this is an expensive and laborious task. In addition, these records can span decades, which means that some recordings may well be on legacy solutions no-longer supported.
Be warned: it may not be all it seems
If you look carefully you will find that all vendor’s software comes with proprietary elements. It is therefore fundamental that financial services organisations must take steps to ensure they can transfer data from alternate or incompatible systems. A key point here is that this preventative action costs far less that corrective action in the future.
But, just as content management platforms enable organisations to search and access a plethora of unconnected documents, there are solutions available that can extract and manage data from a disparate range of capture and storage solutions from multiple vendors and offer it up in a single easy-to-consume central management portal. This shows how technology can be used effectively to support compliance reporting and monitoring.
One single central management portal that gives legal teams an efficient self-service capability, eliminating the heavy lifting that IT departments were previously required to carry out.
By taking this approach, organisations can be far more proactive with their data across multiple departments, conveniently and effortlessly extracting voice recordings so that data can be analysed for trade reconstruction. Voice recordings (on multiple systems, across multiple locations) that fall outside of retention periods can be identified and deleted, eliminating risk and reducing storage costs.
Legal teams will no longer have to laboriously go through recordings to pull out relevant interactions and their time can thus be employed on more business-focused initiatives.
In our digitally connected world, which by its very nature has created a far broader communication trail including the web, email, SMS, Skype/VoIP and WhatsApp amongst others, financial services organisations must be able to manage diverse content in line with customer usage and expectations. From a compliance perspective this means the ability to hop across communications channels from a dialogue that may have started out via telephone and progressed to social media. As these channels continue to expand and the volume of data flowing in and out of organisations grows, it is paramount financial services companies have the flexibility and scalability in their solutions to adequately manage this.
The practical answer for managing the immense amounts of data that will continue to arrive is through a central, vendor neutral portal. One that can pull recording data from a host of systems, from multiple vendors and locations – be they legacy, live, cloud-based or on premise. A single point of access from which all authorised users can view, manage, replay, extract and run reports as required.
As data volumes continue to escalate and the regulatory vista expands and becomes ever more demanding, it is essential that financial services organisations take a smart approach to their data to stay in control and meet communications compliance requirements.
The author is Managing Director of Business Systems (UK) Ltd, a specialist for 30 years in providing call recording and workforce optimisation solutions for investment banks, city trading floors and insurance companies.
