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What 600+ Financial Services Leaders Revealed About Communications Compliance

By October 19, 2023No Comments
2023SurveyReport
2023SurveyReport

What 600+ Financial Services Leaders Revealed About Communications Compliance

The results are in

Theta Lake is delighted to unveil its 2023/24 Digital Communications Governance, Compliance and Security Report. In its fifth year, this unique industry report provides an unparalleled insight into not only how modern unified communication tools are being used in practice and the challenges faced by firms in a unified communication and collaboration (UCC) powered work environment, but also current good and better approaches to managing compliance and security challenges.

The voice of the industry

We are grateful to the more than 600 senior technology and compliance professionals who took part in the independently conducted research, without whom this comprehensive report would not be possible. These exclusive insights portray the voice of the industry, representing IT, Unified Communications and Compliance leaders across financial services in the U.S. and the UK, including 80% of the Globally Significantly Important Banks, the largest financial institutions in the world. Participants’ own words, highlighting specific issues and findings have been shared with permission.

Digital communications governance is a paramount concern for financial services leaders

In an era defined by rapid advancements in the usage of UCC tools 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. Gartner’s newly coined market category, Digital Communications Governance (DCG), acknowledges the need for an updated approach to compliance and security for the UCC tools that make up the fabric of the workplace – and which will become a familiar element of financial services firms’ business plans.

In practice, the compliance burden that firms are currently dealing with, and the incompatibility of existing archiving and recording tools with UCC, is evident, with almost all (98%) of respondents reporting dissatisfaction with their existing archives and voice recording tools.  

Related key trends in the findings highlight:

  • 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, board level priority.commuications_compliance
  • How firms are disabling core UCC features because their pre-existing tools can’t effectively capture them and / or make them searchable for detecting and reporting risks. This has led to unintended consequences, including the continuing use of unmonitored channels as employees opt to use the most effective communication tools.
  • How communications compliance has become a board level focus. That likely comes as no surprise given the intersection of ongoing trends in the digital workplace, including the shift to cloud UCC and migration to cloud voice that is mobile messaging enabled, with the dramatic rise in communication recordkeeping fines.   However, what is particularly noticeable is that the vast majority of firms (77%) are revisiting their approach to communications compliance, alongside another 17% that are planning to.

See how you compare 

As with previous iterations of the report, the findings help organizations benchmark their own practices, experiences and expectations against the wider industry and to help identify any gaps or areas of potential exposure.

By benchmarking against more than 600 financial services peers, you can uncover valuable best practices for reducing your risk profile and compliantly unlocking the full productivity and ROI of UCC investments. If you’re an IT or UC stakeholder for platforms like Microsoft Teams, Webex, Zoom, RingCentral, and Asana or have communications compliance responsibilities, from recordkeeping through to review and supervision, then the must-read insights include:

  • Trends and usage of unified communication platforms
  • Challenges and best practices relating to
    • Capture, recordkeeping and reconciliation
    • Identification, search, replay and responsive retrieval
    • Proactive compliance and supervision
  • Future Expectations – from regulatory expectations to generative AI.
READ THE FULL REPORT.

How Theta Lake Can Help 

Backed by the investment arms of Cisco, RingCentral, Salesforce, and Zoom, Theta Lake’s multi-award winning product suite provides patented compliance and security for modern collaboration platforms, utilizing hundreds of frictionless partner integrations including RingCentralWebex by CiscoMicrosoft 365 and TeamsSlackZoomMoviusBoxMuralAsanaandmore

Theta Lake empowers organizations to safely, compliantly, and cost-effectively expand their use of unified communication platforms by enabling capture, compliant archives, and acting as an archive connector for existing archives of record across video, voice, and chat collaboration systems. Customers benefit from:

  • Searching instantly across participants, all modes of unified communication and collaboration tools, meshed conversations, and timelines in an easy to navigate search system that covers and provides full replay for voice, video, chat, email, images, emojis, files, whiteboards, and more.
  • Patented AI & ML to detect, surface, and enable actual response for regulatory, privacy, and security risks in an AI assisted review workflow with remediation and patented UCC security control integrations for protection across what is shared, shown, spoken, and typed.
  • The ability to ensure that all aspects of messaging can be preserved, and a full audit trail provided to supervisors and regulators. For example, chat messages can be viewed in their native format over the entire history of the conversation, with full context retained including images, GIFs, emojis and reactions.
  • Theta Lake’s risk and compliance suite provides an advanced security and privacy architecture named STAR3 (Secure in Transit, Access, in Redaction, Remediation, and Removal), which is  SOC2 Type II certified with ISO 27001 mapping, PCI DSS certified, 17a-4 and audit trail attested, BAA supported, and undergoes regular penetration testing so our customers, partners, and regulators worldwide are confident in That Lake’s data and system security, integrity, and privacy.

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