Keeping on Top of Regulatory Compliance with Legacy Recording Systems

Record keeping is a critical part of the compliance agenda for any financial services firm across banking, investment, trading and insurance, whether you operate in business or consumer markets.  All companies are under ever closer scrutiny and face the huge burden of having to demonstrate immutable records of all their dealings including what they have to store, how they store it and how accessible that data must be.

To say that the web of different laws and statutory regulations that financial services providers must navigate is complex is to put it mildly.

Whether you are selling or advising on insurance products, investment vehicles, loans or credit cards, bodies like the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) demand a clearly auditable trail of evidence for every transaction and recommendation to ensure you have stuck by the rules and they must be produced at short notice (Dodd Frank specifies within 72 hours).
On top of that, with the recent introduction of the GDPR, you also have to guarantee all record keeping meets stringent data protection and privacy rules.

All of this puts compliance officers under enormous strain. Their job hasn’t been made any easier by the number of channels through which companies do business has multiplied rapidly in recent years. Maintaining up-to-date, centrally managed, ordered and transparent records across branch offices, multiple call centres and numerous different branded websites presents huge logistical challenges.

When there is little integration between channels and only manual processes to fall back on, the compliance burden can become close to unmanageable.

Call recording compliance

In recent times, a lot of attention has been paid in the industry to the so-called MiFID II EU directive which requires anyone involved in financial instruments and commodity derivatives trading, from independent advisers to multinational investment banks, to record and keep all telephone conversations relating to the market. But in truth, compliance officers have long faced dilemmas over call recording.

For example, call recording platforms were traditionally installed on premise at each individual call centre, with no integration with systems elsewhere. If a company had different contact centres for distinct sales and service departments in different locations, these would all record conversations with customers and clients on completely separate systems.
Throw into the mix that some of these banks and contact centres could be on their 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th and even 5^th generation systems most of which have reached end-of-life, the challenge to manage this data becomes even more complex.

If the Compliance Officer comes knocking perhaps investigating an alleged incident of miss-selling, this would cause your compliance team a huge headache. Trying to create a call audit trail to trace who said what and when would become a time consuming, laborious task – hardly in the spirit of transparency regulatory authorities now expect.

Call Recording infrastructure challenges:

• Systems becoming end-of-life voice (software & OS) but the data still needs to be accessed
• Legacy systems from multiple vendors causing technical challenges when a recording needs to be quickly pinpointed
• Bulk extracts need to be performed from legacy and live voice systems
• A growing infrastructure equates to growing costs
• New channels are evolving that need to be recorded and captured and managing those interactions has become more complex
• Core data needs to be kept in its original format to ensure the integrity is not diminished
• Even though some systems may still be supported they don’t have the up to date technology required to use the data to meet changing regulatory and business needs
• There is a lack of global view of live and legacy voice data
• Organisations need to access voice data through open APIs
• Requests from compliance teams who want to be able to self-serve are increasing but it’s impossible to grant access with separate silos of data

You might well ask, if my company still runs legacy call recording applications on premises in various locations, what options are there for improving archive management and auditing other than upgrading to a new, centralised system?

It goes without saying, the unification of both live and legacy call recordings is essential in achieving compliance and operational efficiency and, despite the disparate technology that has proliferated, help is available through the use of sophisticated federating software providing uniformity of control and access across the estate or enterprise.

Full visibility with Wordwatch

The pull of a technology portal that services the world of investment banking and financial institutions is enticing. Nestling in the Gartner Magic Quadrant ‘Enterprise Information Archiving’ (EIA) and Enterprise Information Management (EIM) technology space, Wordwatch is just that portal.

Wordwatch brings together this mixed bag of call recording platforms and siloed data that these organisations produce. The federation process provides:

• Access to data from any system – regardless of manufacturer be it live or legacy
• Uniformity of data extracted from the disparate call recording platforms
• Full control over access to the data
• Compliance-hold
• Deletion criteria and total audit activity i.e. the ‘Gold Standard’

Already used by some of the world’s largest banks, Wordwatch is attracting attention because of its ability to manage any call content, whatever the format or original recording system.  This is attesting to be a substantial aid to productivity while contributing directly to regulatory compliance – the siloed data is now a thing of the past and no longer the bane of the Chief Compliance Officers life.

If you are looking for a way to streamline your call recording processes, reduce TCOs for your recording solutions and improve compliance, get in touch with Business Systems UK and book a Wordwatch demo today.