THE COMPLIANCE CHALLENGE

Regulations don’t care where you are—they care about what you do.

Since the ruling in 2011 by the UK finance governing body, Financial Institutions have been legally required to record all fixed and mobile communication. The ruling was bought in to tackle market abuse, misconduct and help the industry monitor, investigate and prosecute such cases.

On January 3rd, 2018, MiFID II – the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II – came into effect across all EU member states, replacing its 2004 predecessor.

The world is a volatile place at the moment, but rest assured Truphone has you covered. No matter where you are in the world – wherever your offices, whatever countries you are working out of – we support global regulations. We don’t restrict your device use—you can choose what you want to use and how you wish to use it. In these uncertain times, we also afford you and your staff multiple solutions that flex depending on your needs, so no need to worry about changes in your requirements.

Capturing the conversation is just the start of the story.

In Financial Institutions, security and risk management are a high priority. All recordings need to be securely recorded, stored and protected. Some policies lean towards cloud based services, and others to on-site self-owned infrastructure. But the need for secure storage is critical. Once stored, records will need to be accessed by authorised people and protected from access by unauthorised people.

Increasingly we are seeing the migration towards a common “Golden Source” of information. A single “data lake” comprising records from multiple sources enables the production of a broad picture of all interactions surrounding an event. This is often referred to as trade reconstruction or, more recently, as behavioral analytics. However, in reality, it all comes down to the same thing: putting useful information together in the same place with appropriate tools to make sense of it.

To put this into perspective, let’s say you can see someone’s voice messages, voice conversations, text messages, emails, IM and Bloomberg messaging in one location, you can then cross-reference all of that information to see if there’s a consistency in communication, or if there’s something abnormal and in need of raising.

If the end game is the data lake, the final decision is cloud or on-site. Whilst many banks have declared a cloud-first strategy, the reality is somewhat less aspirational. There is no question that those who want to get to the cloud will get there, the challenge is how they manage the journey of adoption.

Truphone provides either on-site mobile recording delivery or cloud recording and storage of all mobile communication globally; the key benefit being that Truphone delivers a consistent approach globally. We reliably capture the conversations and then either securely store them in our cloud or securely send them to you in real-time for storage in your destination—whether that be on your own infrastructure or your chosen cloud provider. We have proven integration with multiple recorder and archive technologies as well as some of the state-of-the-art-analytical tools.

2020 changed the face of the finance industry forever. But the challenges are not over yet.

2020 was a year of extraordinary change; and nowhere has the rapid adjustment to remote working been felt deeper than in the finance industry which had to move its heavily-regulated users from the curated office, trade floor and exchanges to its employees’ kitchens, living rooms and spare bedrooms overnight.

Whilst it has been fairly easy to foresee some of the challenges created by a distributed workforce, in relation to mobile voice and SMS recording, more unexpected challenges have also been exposed. Where before, offices provided infinite bandwidth and full redundancy; now, people’s home broadband and GSM connectivity are key factors in their ability to work from home effectively. Wi-Fi, in particular, is beginning to throw up security and redundancy concerns given that these networks are not enterprise-grade or safe from nefarious infiltration. People are using secure applications, but from their home network—leaving extremely valuable information potentially vulnerable.

The challenge then becomes, how can businesses give their remote employees a work experience that feels as close as possible to the norm whilst remaining secure?

The pandemic response and the shift to more agile working has brought about a major shift in the way the industry works. Luckily, Truphone for Finance has long been championing the need to do business and maintain compliance while away from the traditional office desk. Mobility is at the core of what we do regardless of the reason for mobility.

Despite the surge in demand for BYOD, regulations remain strict.

When it comes to BYOD, one of the greatest challenges is creating effective delineation and making it simple to “do the right thing”. After all, the regulations are no different if a user is calling via a trading turret, or a corporate contracted device or from their personal mobile device. If you make it easier to do the right thing, a regulated user is less likely to accidentally do the wrong thing.

There is a massive conflict occurring between the demand of the users to have all these incredible tools on the latest devices and the demands of the business for supervision and control. Added to this, the new impact of remote working means clients need to work even harder to ensure the appropriate level of controls are maintained.

In the UK, the regulator has informed the market that the transition to remote working environments does not in any way change the compliant record-keeping and supervision obligations of the firms they regulate. This sentiment has been repeated by most financial regulators globally. Compliant call and SMS recording is required wherever you are working.

For compliant BYOD and SMS recording, we ensure control of your mobile estate by delivering a managed environment to any mobile phone be that a personal or corporate device. Contact lists are clearly split between business and private and, where required, calls and SMS can be captured and recorded. Through our cost-effective, sustainable solution, you can significantly reduce operational costs while maintaining compliance globally. We also empower you and your staff to flex in and out of a BYOD model as you see fit, meaning there’s no need to worry about changes in your requirements down the line.