A MULTIVENDOR CENTRALISED VOICE RECORDING REPLAY PORTAL
The Financial Services Industry
As businesses and organisations across Europe were racing to get to grips with the new GDPR data protection and privacy regulations, the financial services industry had another piece of seismic data legislation to contend with.
Under EU law, certain areas of the financial industry – equity trading, for example – have long been required to record and archive all telephone conversations relating to their services. It is all about ensuring transparency in financial dealings by making records of who has said what should disputes or queries arise.
- Then in January 2018, a revised version of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) was rolled out. MiFID II, as it is widely known, has significantly extended the scope of the call recording obligation. Now everyone from ordinary financial advisers upwards has to comply, increasing the number of personnel in the financial sector who are obliged to record calls from 30,000 to an estimated half a million.
This presents a huge operational challenge across the industry, and in many respects puts financial services companies between a rock and a hard place. Rather than having to think through the logistics of having to record and store a minority of calls from a few specialist departments, now firms are faced with having to manage the huge data burden of recording the majority of phone calls made across the organisation, and storing those recordings for between five and seven years.
All of this comes in an environment where, with the GDPR now in force, data protection is expected to be at the forefront of every business’s digital operations. Not only do financial firms have to work out how to store and archive all of this recorded data efficiently, they have to be able to demonstrate they can do so with the upmost security.
The Compliance Challenge
In the UK, every organisation regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FCA) has had to look at introducing call recording systems in areas of the business where they have never had to have them before.
This in itself presents no more than cost and implementation issues. But say you have a trading department which has had call recording equipment installed for years, and now you need to roll it out across the whole organisation. Are you going to be able to integrate an existing legacy system with a modern, up-to-date solution?
Similarly, you may run an existing on-premises call recording platform, but for cost, scalability and flexibility reasons it makes sense to use a cloud-based service elsewhere. Can you make the two compatible, or will you have to throw out the old and start over?
Then there is the issue of retrieval and replay. If you switch from your legacy system, are you going to be able to access the recordings stored on it, which you are still obliged to keep for the lengths of time set out in the MiFID? Alternatively, if you have two or more systems running in parallel so you can maintain an archive of all recordings, you end up with the problem of separate silos with different points of access and no unified means of retrieval or monitoring.
Without a centralised management system, this is where data protection compliance can start to become difficult.
Wordwatch: A Unique Solution
- Fortunately for the financial services sector, technology has an answer. Wordwatch is the only multivendor centralised recording replay portal available on the market and is ideal for resolving all of issues highlighted above in achieving MiFID II compliance.
Let’s just unpick that description of Wordwatch a little. By ‘multivendor’, we mean that it works across call recording platforms, regardless of who the manufacturer is. So if you operate different call recording systems in different parts of the business, some legacy, some modern, some on-premises, some cloud-based, no problem. Wordwatch will replay recordings across them all.
By ‘centralised’, we mean that management of the cross-platform retrieval and replay facilities is achieved via a single user interface. So as well being able to replay recordings from any source, Wordwatch makes access simple, convenient and efficient.
The cutting edge technology employed to consolidate voice recordings across live and legacy systems, and furthermore provide convenient data extraction as well as playback, is unique to Wordwatch.
It therefore stands not only as an ideal compliance tool for organisations having to embrace MiFID II, but as a means of driving genuine competitive advantage through quick, flexible data retrieval and reporting from large-scale recording operations.
Some of Wordwatch’s advanced features include:
- Sophisticated search facility across any capture platform, be it on-premises, cloud or mobile
- Automated extraction schedules for bulk exports to analytics platforms in close to real time
- In-built functions including litigation holds, compliance exports and policy administration
- Advanced reporting across call recording data
As a multi-vendor, centralised platform for both live and legacy call recording, Wordwatch provides the ultimate safety-net for financial institutions seeking to manage MiFID II compliance. As well as safeguarding recording archives from legacy systems, ensuring you never face another ‘end-of-life’ software moment when you can no longer access data you need, it offers a future-proof solution ready to connect to whatever capture technologies emerge in years to come.
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