Compliance used to be easy.

Organizations compelled by law to retain relevant communications would simply archive all hard copy documents and record all analogue voice calls.

It got more complex with the addition of email- back in the late 1990s.

Today, of course, the world’s dizzying array of digital communication channels are myriad, sophisticated, and often integrated with each other via powerful unified platforms such as Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, and the hundreds of others that exist.

As a result, modern compliance also applies to voice over IP, email, messaging, chat, white boards, and even video. Allowing any one of them to fall through the cracks can lead to an unintended – and expensive – breach of the regulations.

In the US, for example, big fines have recently been imposed for non-compliant use of WhatsApp: the smarts (and popularity) of modern, fast-evolving communication preferences colliding catastrophically with the long-established (and wholly appropriate) rules.

It means that, for the organizations for whom compliance with multiple regulations in multiple territories is business-critical, safely leveraging the new, game-changing power of omnichannel communication can be a huge challenge.

Help, however, is close at hand.

“It’s right for businesses to maximize the benefits of the many and varied unified communication platforms and tools that are now significantly enhancing efficiency and user experience – at the same time, regulatory compliance across the communications infrastructure must be assured,” says Susannah Hammond, Senior Regulatory Intelligent Expert at leading UCaaS compliance vendor Theta Lake, whose multi-award winning product suite provides patented compliance and security for collaboration platforms including RingCentral, Webex by Cisco, Microsoft 365 and Teams, Slack, Zoom, Movius, Box, Mural, Asana and more.

“Having the right protections in place enables businesses to unleash all of that new, increased productivity without living in fear. For example, our recent survey of over 600 IT and compliance personnel indicates that 68% of firms are restricting features in their UC platforms, for fear of compliance violations.”

The Theta Lake platform empowers firms to compliantly and cost-effectively expand their use of unified communication investments by acting as an integrated foundation for all component channels’ communications and functionality.

All aspects of messaging can be preserved, and a full audit trail provided to supervisors and regulators. Chat messages can be viewed in their native format over the entire history of the conversation, with full context retained including images, GIFs, emojis and reactions. And full-replay, instant searching enables compliance and IT personnel to detect, surface, and identify risk across all monitored channels and through an intuitive timeline based approach. This enables a precise, and evidenced response to regulatory, privacy, and security risks.

From a future-proofing perspective – and with a global increase in the use of video communication predicted – the Theta Lake solution is unique in its ability to detect risky behaviour in a video, for example the holding up of a note.

“The regulatory scrutiny and focus on all aspects of communications compliance continues unabated and firms need to consider their response,” says Hammond.

“Firms need to consider how to facilitate, and to be able to evidence, compliant communications of every kind. In the current regulatory climate, if firms choose to do nothing and unmonitored or unsupervised communications are found by a regulatory body then significantly larger sanctions are likely.

Indeed, given the recent regulatory rhetoric, it is entirely possible that future sanctions will include senior individual liability and accountability.”

Hammond points to numerous, recent fines by regulators in the US and the UK.

In one, a stockbroking firm was fined $140,000 for failing to capture the required oral pre-trade communications under relevant Commodity Futures Trading Commission and NFA regulations. Regulators did not accept the firm’s claim that its traders unrecorded phone conversations were limited to market recaps, general market commentary and current economic events as opposed to including quotes, offers or trade instructions. Indeed, that approach was badged ‘unrealistic’ by the NFA. Further, the firm was deemed to have utilized a ‘deficient procedure’ by instructing traders to move their discussions to a chat or other written medium once they led to pre-trade negotiations.

In a separate instance, a broker was sanctioned for failing to maintain all personal cell phone conversations. Regulators instructed the firm in question to determine how widespread unrecorded cell phone usage was across all it brokers and desks, and it was found that 25% of its trading activity was unintentionally non-compliant.

As the world continues to communicate and collaborate ever-more smartly – and as integration and unification of solutions, applications and platforms continue to drive efficiency – it’s clear that adherence to the rules and regulations is as critical as it gets.

To learn more about how Theta Lake can help your and your customers’ businesses, visit the website.



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