Communication has never been so easy.
Choice of channel, ease of use, quality of interaction: all have made the exchange of information a mobile-first and frictionless experience.
In broad terms, the evolution of unified business communication technology in particular has been a force for good; driving increased engagement, productivity, and efficiency.
However, in sectors such as banking, interacting with customers and colleagues is a rigidly-regulated affair where all communications must occur via authorised channels and in ways which result in compliant data capture and storage.
Indeed, get caught allowing workers to communicate via non-authorised channels and the penalties can be extremely punitive and, in the worst cases, catastrophically costly.
Thankfully, unified communication platforms can be integrated with solutions that bake-in the ability to automatically detect so-called ‘off channel’ interactions and help regulated businesses keep to the rules.
For those businesses – and their IT service providers – the return on investment can be immeasurably high.
“Typically, regulated knowledge workers communicate via voice calls, email, or the giant go-to platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex that their employers have authorised and which are monitored and managed compliantly – interacting via channels that are not authorised, such as, say, Slack, Snapchat, or Instagram breaches strict regulations and must not occur,” says Chris Stapenhurst, Senior Principal Product Manager at leading data management experts Veritas, whose discovery, surveillance, and file analysis products are supported by clever AI-powered ‘off channel signalling’ functionality.
“Of course, managers routinely issue workers with instructions designed to ensure compliance but often those instructions are forgotten or ignored. Deploying a technological means of reducing the risk of a breach is best practice.”
Cleverly, the Veritas surveillance solution listens 24/7 across an entire communication stack for any indications that workers may be considering or suggesting communicating on a non-authorised channel that is not recorded. A limitless number and configuration of key words or phrases can be input and, if any are detected, an alert mechanism is triggered.
Examples could be a voice call within which a worker tells a customer to “ping me on Snapchat”, or an email simply containing the name of an unauthorised channel such as, say, Slack, WhatsApp, or Instagram, or a text message requesting someone to ‘ttm’ (talk to me), or ‘hmu’ (hit me up) on a non-authorized channel such as Signal.
When triggered, the solution automatically alerts the organisation’s trained human reviewer whose job it is to manage the risk of regulatory non-compliance and recommend action to prevent it.
“Once that has occurred, if a reviewer agrees that there has been a breach, or a risk of one, they tag relevant words or phrases which then enables AI-powered machine learning to constantly train the solution to be more and more effective going forward,” says Stapenhurst.
“These breaches or violations are often not criminal acts but more incompetence. However, the regulators do not care about that. They consider a breach to be a breach regardless of the circumstances.”
The benefits of deploying an off-channel signalling detection technology can be huge. It not only detects potential risk that would otherwise have gone un-noticed but also reduces the expensive, time-consuming need for human reviewers to manually interrogate multiple data sets that often contain thousands of harmless communications.
“These are highly-qualified, highly-expensive, licenced professionals,” says Stapenhurst. “So why are they looking at hundreds of Groupon emails or daily research bulletins? That is not only a waste of resource, it also drives them crazy. They are much more effective and efficient if they are examining data sets that are more likely to indicate potential risk. AI-based alerting mechanisms can provide those kind of data sets and then reviewers feel like they are making a high-value contribution.
We have worked with firms that have increased their risk identification yield by over 300% by leveraging our alert-based mechanisms. They have also reduced the number of false positives by over 95%.”
To learn more about how Veritas can help your and your customers’ businesses stay compliant, visit the website.
