Elly Yates-Roberts |
Financial services organisations can find it helpful to record conversations and electronic communications, but it’s vital that they ensure these recordings are legal.
Following the 2009 financial crisis, regulators and governments introduced stricter rules mandating that financial services providers must keep records of, and carry out surveillance and reporting on, all voice and electronic communications related to their financial trading activities. They include the Dodd-Frank Act in the USA, Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) in the European Union and other country-specific regulations. These rules apply to various firms from the financial industry such as banks, stockbrokers, asset managers, credit unions, insurance providers and corporate finance companies, among others.
Financial authorities and governments expect these organisations to capture all conversations where investment services are provided, as well as dialogues that are intended to result in investment services being provided. Compliance breaches may be punished with heavy fines or trade bans.
Consequently, financial services providers must implement a solution that not only records and stores data for a prescribed retention period, but also provides the ability to retrieve, replay and analyse it for regulatory compliance, risk management, surveillance and evidential purposes. It is also essential that the solution offers other functionalities, including recording control, access and replay rules, rights to delete recordings, selective backup for recordings, approval processing, and more to stay compliant.
Traditionally, companies have used fixed phone lines, so compliance recording has been location-based and few suppliers offer effective solutions for mobile recording. Today, more people are working from home and an increasing number of organisations plan to replace their telephony systems with the Microsoft Teams platform. However, communications via Teams are also subject to MiFID II or Dodd-Frank requirements, so they must all be recorded.
ASC Technologies has developed one of the market’s first complete compliance recording solutions for Teams, ASC Recording Insights. It is the only existing native app integrated in Teams that captures and stores all communication in Microsoft Azure, allowing financial service companies of any size to easily comply with legal requirements.
Using speech services, natural language processing services and emotion detection, the app analyses all recorded communication and turns it into valuable insights to enable organisations to take a proactive approach to compliance management. ASC Recording Insights for Teams can help businesses operating under strict jurisdictions to reap the benefits of digital collaboration while also ensuring complete compliance with key global regulations.
Katrin Henkel is president at ASC Americas at ASC Technologies
This article was originally published in the Winter 2020 issue of The Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.