If you are an IT manager working at a bank, you’re caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) IT policies have encouraged a laissez-faire approach to mobile apps in sales. Brokers tend to use WhatsApp. It’s how customers and brokers like to communicate.
But WhatsApp (and SMS) are not always monitored, so compliance regulations are breached.
CEOs prioritise marketing. It’s the Master which all other departments must slavishly follow. Including Compliance, who’ve had to turn a blind eye.
But as Bloomberg News reported in July 2022, bank employees using unmonitored SMS and WhatsApp have already cost investment banks £200m in fines.
Now power lies with Compliance.
That puts IT managers in the centre of an unpleasant tug-of-war between brokers and Compliance.
Luckily for the beleaguered IT manager, there’s a solution: the Movius and Theta Lake partnership.
Movius provides mobile technology that allows users to securely use WhatsApp and other popular apps compliantly. Theta Lake, the award-winning AI powered compliance platform, ensures that captured content is correctly monitored and archived. Risky sounding words and phrases are automatically drawn to compliance officers’ attention.
Why can’t current solutions cope?
Two reasons.
- Manpower – legacy applications conserve content in chunks. It has to be manually checked.
- Fear – there’s no workable solution that automatically forces users to use WhatsApp and SMS compliantly. So, CEOs bend to Compliance’s demands and ban them.
Clients are then upset too. They prefer WhatsApp.
To the rescue… Movius and Theta Lake combine
Movius is an enterprise mobile phone app. It separates business and personal calls though a dedicated business line. Crucially it delivers full and easy access to WhatsApp compliantly. Automatically every call is recorded. Messages and emojis are captured too. The end user does nothing; everything happens in the background.
Meanwhile Theta Lake captures data from the Movius app. It is stored compliantly. AI and Natural Language Processing automatically detects and surfaces phrases, emojis, and reactions that may indicate insider trading, inflated valuations and other nefarious activities. Not only does this eliminate the need for staff sifting through vast amounts of data, but detection is also more efficient.
A silver bullet, but…
What if customers already have legacy archive solutions?
“Many of our customers have their own native infrastructure. So we can support that and competitive alternatives to us. We can route the content, and still supervise and analyse it as it heads into a legacy archive.” says Anthony Cresci, SVP of Finance, Business Development and Operations at Theta Lake.
“Customers may also have archive vendors that address WhatsApp usage”, continues Cresci. “This legacy approach is complex. End users themselves must register their devices, remembering to turn on WhatsApp monitoring and usage. With Movius and Theta Lake, data capture and monitoring are automatic.”
So now brokers are happy. Everyone can use WhatsApp. And bank industry IT managers can start gaining credit for allowing businesses to grow unimpeded by Compliance.
