by Raphael Guilley, VP Risk & Compliance Solutions, IPC

The massive amounts of interactions related to trades that are being recorded and collected to meet today’s growing compliance requirements are daunting.  It’s no longer limited to just a trader’s voice conversations and needs to capture ALL types of interactions, including text, IM, email, mobile, and social media. This is an ever-growing challenge for financial firms who must capture data from all their regulated users involved in pre-, during and post-trade activities and include communications from far beyond the trader’s turret.

Text messages, instant messages, emails, mobile phones calls, social media chatter and more are all piling up data from disparate sources that must be retained, and managed for potential regulatory requests and review. We are working with our clients to address this unique challenge to establish and manage a holistic approach to archiving multiple sources of regulated interactions.

Let’s start by looking at why most firms want to manage this data holistically versus a resource-intense and siloed approach to each type of data source. They value and want to:

1. Invest in a global, secure, scalable and on-demand communications information governance platform.
2. Rely on a platform that stores and catalogues both e-communications and voice communications – seamless capture, archive and analytics through a convenient and cost-effective cloud-based system instead of one requiring more onsite infrastructure and people to manage.
3. Automatically address data sovereignty challenges around where data can be captured, stored and shared from country to country.
4. Leverage next-generation technology with industry-leading partners to ensure their compliance efforts are as comprehensive as possible and as easy to integrate with innovations to come, so as to future-proof their archiving systems as best they can.

The increasing breadth and complexity of record-keeping and record-delivery guidelines has created market demand for flexible cloud-based platforms with analytics, search, policy guidelines and archiving of all data formats. Uniting the disparate interaction sources in a meaningful way will certainly be an industry breakthrough that all financial firms will welcome.

The ability to manage holistically the communications data related to specific transactions from where the data originated to where it will be consumed by those individuals providing the various lines of compliance defense for their organization will be a distinct competitive advantage for financial firms wanting to ensure they comply with regulatory requirements.

We look forward to the delivery of a solution that meets these complex needs for disparate data and addresses the challenge of archiving it all.