Call Me? How New Communication Modalities Complicate Compliance

If Blondie’s number 1 hit ‘Call Me’ (released in 1980) was rewritten for today, it might have been ‘Let’s Chat,’ ‘Text Me’ or have alluded to some other method of communication. After all, today we’re just as likely to text, video call, or chat as place a phone call. And with more people (including regulated employees) working from home, using mobile phones, unified communications and instant messaging apps, these new ways of communicating are spilling over into work as well. The big difference is – regulated employee communications are subject to regulations. 

In fact, there are now more regulations than ever around trade communications – irrespective of platform or modality – which means that financial services organizations must think carefully about how to capture, archive and retain them in order to remain compliant. For example, regulations like Dodd Frank and MAR require trading communications to be recorded. But MiFID II goes a step further, stipulating that ALL communications that result in transactions (whether intended or not), across ALL modalities (PBXs, turrets, mobile phones, unified communications, video, chat, email, etc.) must be recorded. MiFID II even mandates proof of compliance. 

This regulatory quagmire can create enormous headaches for financial institutions, especially those that still rely on manual compliance assurance processes. Thankfully, NICE’s compliance assurance solutions address these challenges for all types of communications by automating compliance assurance processes around:

Recorder and System Health Checks

Compliance Assurance Reporting

MiFID II is the first regulation of its kind to impose an additional requirement around evidence of recording. With automated compliance assurance reporting you can confidently audit, and document communications capture compliance on a moment’s notice. With NiCE, evidence can easily be provided to regulators that all regulated communications (regardless of modality) have been properly captured, archived and retained.

Call Extraction

MiFID II, Dodd-Frank and FX Global Code of Conduct are not only placing greater demands on FSOs to accurately record large volumes of trade conversations, they are also mandating that FSOs provide this information in a more timely manner, in some cases within a mandated 72-hour period. Our automated call extraction capability can support highly complex and large investigations, enabling millions of recordings, regardless of modality, to be downloaded in a single day,

User Provisioning

Manually configuring and provisioning users is a cumbersome, time-consuming, and risky process. Automated provisioning enables moves, adds and changes to be centrally managed, and ensures compliant recording and retention for all regulated users and all communication modalities. An expanded API (Application Programming Interface) enables compliance assurance solutions to automatically synchronize with golden-source systems for up-to-date information, eliminating errors typically associated with manual data entry.

Want to learn more about this topic? I invite you to tune in to NiCE’s Interactions Live virtual conference which took place on September 2020 and is now available on demand, Simply click here to register for free.