Compliance

Legacy voice data can be challenging for organisations – often difficult to keep track of, manage, and adhere to regulatory demands. Nevertheless, there are a few key steps that can be taken to simplify legacy voice data management.  1. Consolidate your View of your Legacy Voice Data For organisations with considerable legacy voice data estates, one of the biggest challenges is keeping tabs on many different storage solutions that may be in use simultaneously. Because the nature of voice recording...

Organisations are currently grappling with the FCA’s Consumer Duty regulation - a catalyst for firms to protect, empower, and act in good faith with their customers.  We caught up with our client success team - Mo Hassan and Hamish Cliff, as well as our Head of Solutions & Architecture - Neil Draycott, to gather their expert insights on how organisations should be shaping these requirements into actionable growth.  Consumer Duty Act - What do organisations need to know? The FCA...

As international hubs where individuals from different backgrounds and cultures come together, the diversity of trading floor and banking environments can introduce complexities in voice transcription due to variations in accents, dialects, and industry-specific jargon. Compliance teams must ensure that transcriptions accurately capture the intended meaning of conversations, even when language barriers or technical terminology exist. The majority of errors or inaccuracies in transcriptions often come from transcription engines which are unable to cope with trader speed and jargon. This...

Ten years ago, our working days of communication were heavily reliant on phone calls or email. Fast forward to the present day, our communication methods have been transformed by the addition of collaboration tools and instant messaging platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, and WhatsApp. These systems have dominated the way we work and communicate. However, for organisations in regulated industries, the adoption of platforms  such as these, could be the recipe for a non-compliance nightmare. For many firms,...

With markets fluctuating wildly due to the economic effects of the coronavirus outbreak, and companies closing offices and asking employees to work from home, organisations have had to adapt rather quickly in uncertain times. Financial Services Firms in particular, have had the burden of setting up traders to work remotely, recreating the carefully monitored environment of the trading floor at not just one site, but potentially thousands. According to The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) all firms are expected to have...

In order to stay one step ahead, financial services organisations are shifting their focus to the customer experience (CX). Although operational efficiency and profitability are still top of the list, rising customer expectations and pressure from the competition has meant CX and everything that goes with it, needs to be heavily considered from a strategic perspective.The meaning of customer experience can be defined in many ways. We think Gartner’s explanation hits the nail on the head. According to Gartner, the...

Call data legacy migration consists of moving your recording data from one place to another in order to be able to access it beyond what the system allows. Under what circumstances will a company need to look at call data legacy migration? Many organisations will have call recordings spanning decades and accessibility isn’t that simple.  So under what circumstances would an organisation need to consider call data legacy migration? Call recording systems reaching end-of-life: Manufacturers announce a product is now...

With the introduction of MiFID II back in January last year and with regulations set to increase and become more burdensome, Financial organisations are faced with constant challenges around managing and accessing their call recording data. Organisations need to be able to demonstrate immutable records of all their dealings and be able to retrieve these communications with precision and speed in the event of an audit or investigation. It’s not just one or two issues that need to be managed...

Financial services organisations have never been under more pressure to maintain tight control over their data.  Regulations now require banks, insurance companies, financial advisers and many others to record every call, keeping up-to-date archives stretching back for extended periods. Driven by the agenda pressing for greater transparency in financial sectors, organisations must be able to retrieve and access information from individual calls on demand in order to remain compliant. For large companies running multiple operations, perhaps in several different locations,...

In an effort to comply with ever-tightening regulations such as MiFID II, Financial Institutions have re-focused their efforts on expanding their compliance teams as well as investigating already established technologies, such as Speech and Text Analytics. This technology has proven to be extremely useful in: Preventing issues from escalating by providing the necessary means to search proactively through recordings for ‘high risk’ keywords and phrases Supporting compliance by quickly finding and retrieving calls requested by regulatory bodies In light of...

As the New Year slowly creeps in, we thought it timely to update our article ‘Top 6 technologies that will drive recording compliance in 2017’, and look at it from a 2018 perspective. We’re excited about 2018. The FIFA football world cup is happening and, according to experts, Mars will be making its closest approach to Earth since 2003. Some exciting events to look forward to. And, let’s not forget MiFID II in January. As regulatory frameworks within the financial...

Resilient plc and Business Systems have announced a strategic partnership to enable compliance with both GDPR and MiFID ll compliance solutions.These forthcoming regulations, due to come into UK law in January 2018 and May 2018 respectively, place great demands on organisations that need to record their business telephone calls, with significant penalties for firms that are non-compliant.The challenge these regulations place on businesses is that, in many respects, they appear to make competing demands. For example:Under MiFID II, firms need to...

Following the recent strain of the WannaCry ransomware attack, experts have cautioned that the best protection for systems running the Microsoft Windows operating system, is to have downloaded a patch issued by Microsoft in March. 1. What if my server is no longer supported by Windows?  If your system is no longer supported by Microsoft (this includes Windows XP, and 2003) then this means your system is extremely vulnerable to hackers. In the voice recording world, a similar cyberattack could...

Compliance Project of the Year was another closely fought category at this year’s event, with the judges opting to award the win to Business Systems for its Vocal Wordwatch solution. Financial institutions today are facing tightening national and international regulatory requirements, as government authorities collaborate to uncover suspicious trading activities. One of the most important requirements for financial institutions is the archiving, storage and replay of telephony, radio and turret recordings for set amounts of time, which can be up...

Communications technology business TeleWare has begun its celebrations of 25 years of market-leading innovation. Over the last quarter of a century, the company has embraced a philosophy of ‘better business through better communications’ and has held innovation at its core, resulting in a number of world firsts. TeleWare has consistently been at the forefront of the communications industry, initially working with British Gas to deliver hot-desking solutions and improve pager connectivity in the early 1990s. This was just the start...

The mis-selling of Payment Protection Insurance was the first to highlight a need for banks to improve monitoring of customer-agent interactions to ensure compliance was being upheld. Moreover, after the 2008 global financial crisis, consumers have became more aware and open to complain about the service being delivered when and if they feel they are being miss-sold too. Figures published by the FCA regarding consumer complaints in 2018, show how important it is for banks to re-engineer the way they...

Business Systems has won the award for Compliance Project of the Year at the FStech Awards 2017, with its Vocal Wordwach solution.Business Systems (UK) Ltd, leading compliance and performance optimisation solutions provider, announced that it has won the ‘Compliance Project of the Year’ award at the FStech Awards 2017. Now into their 17th year, the FStech Awards recognise excellence and innovation in the field of information technology within the UK and EMEA financial services sector. The Compliance Project of the...

With less than a year to go until the application of MiFID II, it is becoming increasingly clear that cultural change is being pursued by the financial regulators as a pressure mechanism to achieve systemic compliance. A characteristic example is that of W H Ireland Limited who, in February 2016, was fined by the FCA for failing to take reasonable care to organise, maintain and manage effective systems and controls to protect against the risk of market abuse. Poor governance...

[Last Updated: March 2018] The way call recordings are stored, plays an important role in ensuring organisations are able to access audio assets either for compliance or business intelligence purposes. Magnetic tape represents one of the riskiest storage mediums for recordings as it has a finite lifespan (10-20 years) and is susceptible to premature degrading dependent on storage conditions and access frequency. In the past, keeping multiple copies and transcription have been the recommended failsafe methods. Today however, digitisation (moving...

Top 6 technologies that will help achieve the required levels of recording compliance for 2017 and beyond.

Business Systems' Will Davenport explains how award-winning Vocal Wordwatch can provide a viable, secure solution for legacy and live call replay from a single point of access. One of the reoccurring hot topics our clients are coming to talk to us about is Vocal Wordwatch; a legacy replay solution which helps organisations access old call recording data as well as replay live calls all from one portal, making the data mining process easier and more effective.Vocal Wordwarch is a modular...

Business Systems wins Recognised Leaders in Workforce Optimisation Solutions – UK award, where its unique Vocal WordWatch portal is recognised as Best for Call Retrieval & Replay Technology – UK    Isleworth, September 20 2016 – Business Systems announced today that it is among the winners of the coveted 2016 Technology Innovator Awards that recognise and reward the individuals, departments and firms behind the ground-breaking developments that change the way we do business for the better. The company, with its...

Telco and IT Systems failure has never been a readily acceptable option for the financial community particularly now, given the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA's) increasing focus on regulatory compliance. With alarming regularity, fines are being issued by the FCA - this year levels are already in excess of £818 million*. For those firms such as trading floors or financial institutions, systems failure would not only result in substantial fines but also the probable destructive loss to business if trading were...

Do you know whether your older call recordings meet the PCI compliance requirements of today? If you’ve only just recently implemented a PCI Compliant call recording solution but still need to retain recordings where you took credit card data from customers a few years back, those legacy call recordings still need to meet PCI Compliance requirements. In other words sensitive customer credit card data should not be accessible by your business or your agents, regardless of how old the call...

There is still a lot of confusion surrounding what constitutes a PCI compliant call recording solution. As an independent provider of a number of PCI compliant solutions we are in a unique position to be able to review and assess the individual requirements of our customers and identify a compliant solution best matched to budget and need. Thanks to the recent addition of a hosted PCI payment solution to our portfolio in some cases there is no need to invest...

Update August 2016 - We’ve recently put together an updated article on PCI DSS Compliance. Check out our latest articles on this topic – The Insiders' Guide to Contact Centre PCI Compliance Pause and resume in call recording can help you meet your PCI compliance obligations, but ideally this needs to be an automated process rather than an agent triggered manual method. So it’s worth reminding ourselves of the three forms of automated methods that can be used in call recording...

Following my previous blog on PCI DSS Compliance, I had some push-back on my claim that confusion persists in UK organisations regarding call recording for PCI compliance. So it’s only fair and reasonable that I should justify my observations and explain precisely why I believe that some organisations still aren’t getting it. Business Systems specialises in call recording technology implementations and with 25 years’ experience as an independent provider we have pretty much designed, installed and provided on-going service delivery...

Confusion persists in UK organisations despite the fact that PCI DSS Compliance has been on our collective agenda since 2006. In our work in the sector, the areas where we encounter most confusion can be brought into focus with three key questions: What payment card information are we talking about? We’re talking about sensitive authentication data including the full magnetic stripe data, card validation codes or pin and on no account can organisations retain such information, in any format, even...

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) have raised their game in recent years tackling market abuse by targeting not just individuals but the firms implicated in cases. FSA fines issued in 2010 alone, reached £90 million and the trend seems set to continue. At a recent breakfast briefing, Business Systems invited Ian Mason, Partner at legal firm Baker & McKenzie LLP to highlight the challenges financial firms are facing when striving to achieve compliance. Transaction Reporting Transaction reporting is a hot...

Boston-based Eze Castle Integration, a leading provider of technology and IT services to hedge funds and investment firms, today announced a partnership with Business Systems, the United Kingdom’s largest and most established independent call recording specialist. Business Systems will support Eze Castle’s London-based clients call recording and archiving solutions to help them achieve total compliance with the Financial Services Authority’s March 2008 CP07/9 ruling that mandates investment firms to record conversations and maintain electronic records. The combination of Eze Castle’s...

Update August 2016 – We’ve recently put together an updated article on PCI DSS Compliance. Check out our latest articles on this topic – The Insiders’ Guide to Contact Centre PCI Compliance. Can we ever really believe our personal banking information is safe? The government can’t seem to manage it nor the private sector as Nationwide proved with their £1m FSA fine for security lapses. So where does this leave us? Visa and Mastercard have implemented their own measures to...

Business Systems’ hosting company OPEX has recently invested in technology from Compliant Phones which records both speech and SMS texts from mobile phones. The new technology forms an essential part of the company’s strategy of providing a tamper-proof solution for those organisations where compliance with FSA or best practice regulations are needed. The roll out of these applications is being fuelled by the growing need for organisations to record mobile phones as well as landlines. The drive is coming from...

The latest FSA ruling in relation to recording telephone calls for the UK financial markets hit the news in March. The updated statement outlined that brokers trading in stocks, shares, bonds and derivatives will be required to record telephone conversations and other electronic communications which relate to client orders and the conclusion of transactions to help deter market abuse. Highlights from the report are;- a deadline for compliance has been set for March 2009, the call retention period which some...

The ‘Markets in Financial Instruments Directive’ (MiFID) comes into force in November 2007. Those companies that are looking to comply with this directive will need to demonstrate that they have applied best efforts to give their clients suitable and appropriate advice. This will need to be evident with processes that show best execution, transaction reporting and record keeping. With the emphasis squarely on market transparency, firms will need to hold auditable transaction data and make provisions for regulatory reporting in...