Report highlights the ongoing risk of major fines for financial services firms from unmonitored or improperly captured communications, making the need for digital communications governance an urgent priority
Santa Barbara, CA—October 18 2023 – In an era defined by rapid advancements in the usage of unified communication and collaboration tools (UCC) and an evolving regulatory landscape that has led to fines now totalling over $2.6bn for recordkeeping failures, the importance of digital communications governance cannot be overstated. The groundbreaking survey, independently conducted for Theta Lake, a leading authority in Digital Communications Governance (DCG), provides comprehensive insights into the challenges and opportunities faced by financial institutions in the realm of compliance for UCC.
The 5th annual survey, focused exclusively on global financial services, gathered input from the largest sample set to-date on this topic with over 600 IT and compliance professionals across the US and UK. The Theta Lake Digital Communications Governance, Compliance and Security Report provides an unparalleled picture of how UCC platforms are being used, the challenges faced by financial services firms in a UCC powered work environment as well as practical suggestions for improved compliance strategies. As with prior years’ reports, the insights are intended to help organizations benchmark their own practices, experiences and expectations against the wider industry, and address any gaps or areas of exposure they may have. Key trends include:
- Three quarters (74%) of respondents say it’s likely their employees are using unmonitored communications channels, up from 66% in 2022.
- Two thirds (68%) of firms reported disabling features across their approved communications tools in order to manage challenges relating to search visibility, compliance, privacy or security.
- Regulatory expectations to monitor communications will increase according to 78% of financial institutions.
- Only 6% are confident in their approach to communications compliance, a concerning statistic given the increasing global enforcement actions and fines for communications compliance capture and monitoring failures.
Productivity – the fundamental promise of these cutting-edge collaboration tools, is hamstrung when organizations are forced to delay deployments, turn off key features or even inhibit platforms altogether. That disablement not only hurts productivity, it also creates less engagement with monitored communication tools and more engagement with unmonitored tools. “In our research, a significant percentage of companies disable communications and collaboration applications because they lack the ability to ensure compliance. This leads to reduced productivity, and reduced ROI for application investments,” said Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst at Metrigy. “By utilizing capabilities provided by vendors like Theta Lake for capture and recordkeeping companies can safely achieve maximum value from their collaboration applications.”
“There is a vicious circle for financial services organizations centered around modern communication tools and difficult regulatory compliance capture, record keeping, and monitoring requirements for those communications,” said Theta Lake CEO and Co-Founder Devin Redmond. “Basically, the limitations of current compliance tools in addressing the mesh of UCC tools and integrated modalities of text, voice, visual, video, etc., drives disablement of unified communication and collaboration features. That in turn directly results in an increase in the usage of off-channel communications on more feature-rich and easy-to-use unmonitored tools. Thus, creating a cycle of more unmonitored communications combined with a negative impact on UCC adoption and ROI. We believe our DCG technology unlocks the full feature sets of UCC in a way that not only drives the competitive ROI and workforce productivity benefits of UCC, but it can also drive engagement with monitored UCC, reduce off-channel communication, and make it easier for compliance teams to prove and improve record keeping, search, and proactive compliance.”
Ease of use of the compliance solution, unification of voice, eComms, and new modality archiving with the ability to reconcile record capture and recordkeeping featured heavily as big trends in this year’s report. In a new question for 2023, respondents were asked what the ideal recordkeeping for modern communications looks like. The biggest response was for the recordkeeping system to be easy to use, followed by secure and tailored capture. Theta Lake, which maintains a “100% would recommend” rating on Gartner Peer Insights, regularly hears from customers that the ease of use and effective unified capture across a broad communications toolset are key reasons for choosing the Theta Lake solution.
To download the 2023/24 Digital Communications Governance, Compliance and Security Report, click here.
ABOUT THETA LAKE
Theta Lake’s multi-award winning product suite provides patented compliance and security for modern collaboration platforms, utilizing more than 100 frictionless partner integrations that include Zoom, RingCentral, Microsoft Teams, Webex by Cisco, Slack, Asana, Movius, Mural and more. Theta Lake can capture, act as a unified archive connector across modalities for pre-existing archives of record, and/or act as a completely unified archive for all eComms aComms (voice), vComms (video and images), and more. In addition to comprehensive capture and archiving, Theta Lake enables unified search and full replay across all modalities and content types including full conversation views across meshed UCC tools and media types. With unified visibility, customers can more successfully implement proactive compliance using patented ML and AI to detect regulatory, privacy, and security risks in communications where AI assisted review surfaces potential risks to compliance reviewers and provides response and remediation mechanisms that can be demonstrated in reports to audit and regulators as proof of policy enforcement across what is shared, shown, spoken, and typed. Theta Lake enables organizations to safely, compliantly, and cost-effectively expand their use of communication platforms. Visit us at ThetaLake.com; LinkedIn; or X @thetalake.
MEDIA CONTACT
Kathryn Lodato
VP Global Marketing
Theta Lake, Inc.
kathryn.lodato@thetalake.com,
805-427-5123
