As technologically-driven solutions continue to firmly pierce the financial industry and how it runs, the need for firms to maintain compliance amongst a deluge of new regulations and expectations means that compliance firms must keep up. To do this, will compliance technology reign supreme in 2024?
…Stacey English, director of regulatory intelligence at Theta Lake, explained that 2024 is proving to be a pivotal year as the industry shifts towards widespread adoption of compliance technology that is compatible with their modern workplace, with in her view the Theta Lake’s recent announcement of Zoom Compliance Manager serving as a tangible example of this change.
She said, “Unified communications platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Team, Cisco Webex and RingCentral have become part of the fabric of organizations – bringing a move from purely voice calls and email to rich chat conversations, video, cloud-based calling, combined with collaboration tools like digital whiteboards.
“But firms are facing significant compliance pain because their existing compliance tools built for a different era aren’t compatible,” English remarked. “Typically the archive infrastructure in place is split across voice and text-based communication with little integration and even less coverage for mixed mediums and the mesh of tools – which impedes everything from capture and recording keeping to context, search, and risk detection.”
English highlighted research that found almost all of the 600 financial services firm surveyed were dissatisfied with their existing archives and voice recording tools. “Add to that the unrelenting regulatory focus on record keeping and oversight failures with fines in the U.S. exceeding $2.6bn and regulators warning of higher penalties because firms are on notice. So it’s no surprise that over three-quarters of firms have said they are revisiting their communications compliance this year with 48% investing in specific compliance communications solutions,” she commented.
In the opinion of the regulatory intelligence director English, keeping pace as new communication features and tools are added is a real struggle.
“The challenge for most organisations is that new tools have so many features and types of communications all meshed together – such as emojis mixed with text, chat comments on whiteboards, chat in a video meeting, images with text in them or files shared via a link in a chat or meeting,” she explained. “In practice, many firms turn those features off because their pre-existing tools can’t effectively capture them and/or make them searchable for detecting and reporting risks – which then has the unintended non-compliance consequences of driving staff to alternative unmonitored methods to communicate.”
She concluded, “Having the most comprehensive coverage compliance for unified communications and collaboration tools is critical for our regulated customers. We’re helping firms make sure they can capture all the different tools and channels like email, chat, video, whiteboards alongside all the contextual information like emojis and reactions, and then be able to search and retrieve those records.
“It’s clear that Unified Communications providers are feeling the need from customers too and making it a priority to help them by providing more ways to solve recording keeping and supervision needs.”
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