Compliance is a crucial consideration for any business.
In every industry, there are specific regulations and guidelines that companies must adhere to when it comes to using, managing, and processing data. However, maintaining and ensuring compliance can be particularly challenging in the financial services sector.
Financial services companies are subject to strict guidelines and rules governing how they should protect their consumers. By working with the right partners, these organizations can minimize risk, protect their reputation, and avoid expensive fines.
The right call recording and archiving partner will ensure financial services companies collect, store, and protect information according to the standards set by regulatory bodies.
Choosing a Compliance Partner: Regulatory Requirements
Each industry has its own specific requirements for how data should be managed and stored. In the financial services landscape, companies are expected to collect, maintain, and preserve data from communications and transactions to adhere to a variety of regulatory standards.
Compliance regulations created for the financial service space aim to regulate activity, combat fraud, and protect consumer interests. For many businesses, the first step to choosing an effective recording and archiving partner, is understanding the requirements of each crucial regulation. Some of the most common areas to address for financial services companies include:
- FCA Guidelines: The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), requires financial services companies to provide access to records of communication and transactions. Teams need to use tools like 256-bit AES encryption to prevent tampering and ensure data can be quickly exported and shared for auditing purposes.
- GDPR: The General Data Protection Regulation revolves around keeping customers informed of how their data is being used and providing them with the right to be forgotten. Recording tools can prevent certain numbers from being recorded and allow users to delete captured information upon request. Plus, they can provide auditing tools for tracking GDPR-related activities and sending time-limited links to data.
- MiFID II: The Markets in Financial Industry directive requires telephone conversations and contextual data from communications to be recorded and preserved for auditing purposes. Companies must leverage 256-bit AES encryption for securing stored recordings, alongside tools with legal hold rules, which allow recordings to be tagged for evidence in legal cases.
- PCI-DSS: Crucial for any company involved with transactions, the Payment Card Industry Security Standard aims to reduce fraud, and requires businesses to omit sensitive card details from data storage. The right recording and reporting tool will allow users to pause recordings during payments, tag recordings where payments are taken, and leverage speech analytics to monitor policy adherence.
- BACS: The Bankers Automated Clearing Services standards require companies to track transactions with voice recording and similar methods. Blanket call recording and archiving tools will allow companies to preserve and store data from each transaction.
Assessing the Needs of the Financial Services Sector
While all of the industry regulations surrounding the Financial Services sector have their own unique requirements to consider, most require companies to collect, manage, and maintain accurate, immutable recordings from a range of conversations. While there are many call recording solutions out there, including tools built into telephony solutions, not all options are created equal.
Some of the most important factors financial services companies will need to consider when choosing the ideal recording and archiving partner include:
Direct Routing Recording
The native recording often included with a standard phone system can be quite basic. Some users need to manually click to start and stop a call recording, and searching through content can be complex. To make matters worse, most recordings aren’t automatically encrypted, which can lead to compliance issues. Direct routing recording could be an excellent alternative.
A direct routing system can offer more features like searching and filtering. However, Financial Services companies will need to ensure the tools they choose also come with encryption, controlled access, and comprehensive recording features (such as the ability to capture screens and text). Recording solutions leveraging the Microsoft Graph API for Microsoft Teams, for instance, can capture calls made between Teams users and to/from legacy phone systems, in contrast to direct routing recording that only records PSTN lines.
Integration Needs
The best platform providers offer flexible, innovative tools to enhance or replace inadequate native recording capabilities offered by some UC platforms. They can assist with fraud deterrence, compliance monitoring, and data storage.
An effective call recording and archiving partner will be able to provide a tailored recording solution built to work with the tools companies are already using. This could mean looking for a Microsoft certified recording partner for Teams, for example, or embedding additional archiving capabilities into native UC contact center call recording to deliver crucial compliance features.
