Financial firms worldwide must comply with certain rules and regulations, including call monitoring and retention regulations. In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority or FCA obliges firms to monitor and record calls. The firms must also have internal controls allowing compliance officers to identify whether advisors are demonstrating compliant behavior according to the FCA’s standards.
Like how UK firms have to comply with a UK regulator’s requirements, firms in the US and other parts of the globe must comply with region-specific laws and regulations. The compliance requirements will largely be the same, with some differences in the length of retention and what communications data to retain. What they do have in common is that text messages, mobile calls, WhatsApp chats, WeChat messages, and other relevant electronic messages must be archived. The medium doesn’t matter as long as the message is trade-related.
When aiming to comply with regulations, the essential elements to keep in mind are the following:
- Being able to identify high-risk traders and monitor them
- Being able to develop lexicons for high-volume voice call-based trades
- Being able to monitor calls through real-time speech analytics proactively
- Upgrading legacy recording systems for efficient call archiving
Achieving any of the essential elements above will require firms to get a robust mobile call monitoring solution. The last element is important because old systems may not be able to effectively archive phone calls, let alone proactively monitor calls using analytics. Legacy systems also tend to be manually operated, and having an automatic solution to record information automatically without manual operation seamlessly is better than manually recording messages.
Having a robust archiving solution ensures that a firm or organization can comply with all relevant regulations. The knowledge that messages and calls are automatically recorded can deter employees and traders from doing illegal activities since they cannot exactly delete messages to cover their tracks.
For more information, see this infographic by TeleMessage.
