Regulatory compliance officers and their IT colleagues have had a hard time lately.
Firms have benefited from Zoom, Teams, and many productivity-enhancing Unified Communications (UC) tools.
But financial regulators across the world stipulate that firms must monitor, supervise and archive written and oral communications (including chat IM, whiteboards, video email, or telephone calls whether on Zoom, Teams or other tools). That can be expensive, time-consuming, and impractical. But for banks, failure to comply has already caused over $1.8bn in fines this year in the US alone, and the UK's PRA has sanctioned one UK firm.
So, the easiest solution for compliance officers and their IT colleagues is to turn off key UC features.
The Law of Unintended Consequences
Whether for malign reasons, through desperation or absent-mindedness, staff have communicated as a result with clients using their (unmonitored) personal devices and private messaging accounts. That has attracted regulators' ire.
As Commodities Futures Trade Commission Commissioner Christy Goldsmith Romero warned recently, "Tone at the top must change on Wall Street. Change can only happen if the banks' C-suite establishes a culture of compliance over evasion."
Now, over half of the highly regulated firms have disabled essential features. That affected end-user experiences, and so it has turned out, exacerbated banks’ C-Level management's worst fears.
Turning Off UC Features Puts Firms At Greater Risk
As Theta Lake’s Stacey English warns, "Firms need to recognise that turning off chat and other features puts them more at risk. It wastes money rolling out these tools and diverts people's attention away from meetings, pushing them to unmonitored channels like WhatsApp or Signal."
