While preserving data security and maintaining compliance with industry standards can be complex in any landscape, financial services companies face some unique challenges. Regulatory bodies like SEC, FCA, FINRA, and other global regulators impose specific requirements on financial organizations for capturing, retaining, and managing communications data.
Unfortunately, as the communications landscape continues to evolve, financial services institutions have more channels to monitor and protect than ever before. According to recent studies, around 62% of surveillance professionals believe there are gaps in their strategy, caused by the rapid proliferation of new channels and communication mediums.
Failure to implement the right strategies for data capture and management leads to significant problems for these brands. Not only do cyber-attack risks increase, but companies can be subject to legal action, reputational damage, and huge fines. In 2022 alone, Wall Street firms paid more than $1.8 billion in fines for the misuse and improper monitoring of WhatsApp communications.
So, how do financial services vendors choose the right surveillance solution to protect themselves?
Finding the Right Surveillance Provider: What to Look For
Compliance has always been a complex consideration for financial services company. However, as the amount of data generated from electronic communication sources continues to increase, the challenges these businesses face are evolving.
While the data collected by your institution can help to accelerate innovation, improve customer experiences, and enhance operational efficiencies, it comes with a host of hurdles to overcome. The right surveillance provider is necessary to ensure financial services companies can:
- Capture the right information across a variety of channels
- Preserve and archive information securely
- Classify and enrich data with intelligent tools
- Surface relevant content easily for various purposes
- Control and preserve compliance
Here are the key things you should be looking for in your surveillance solution.
1. Extensive and Comprehensive Capture
One of the biggest challenges financial services companies face in today’s compliance landscape comes from the rapid development of new communication tools and channels. It’s not enough to simply capture and store phone conversations through PSTN lines anymore.
Companies need to ensure they’re collecting rich data from every communication channel, from WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams, to Zoom video conferencing, and email. A comprehensive surveillance solution should enable your business to capture and manage content across every channel you use, maintaining full context and fidelity.
The best tools will minimize your compliance risks, allowing you to preserve information, while using existing infrastructure, rather than relying on a third-party.
2. Unified Data Archiving and Retention
Capturing information across every channel is just step one towards financial services compliance. You also need to ensure you’re storing all of the information you collect in a unified repository, protected by the highest security standards. An effective surveillance solution will allow you to store all of your content, in various different forms, in an immutable, regulation-compliant archive.
Innovative platforms will allow for granular control over expiry, access, and retention policies, ensuring enterprise-grade security throughout your data lifecycle. Look for a surveillance solution that provides access to:
- A single searchable repository within secure and private multi-tenant data centers
- Protection against unauthorized and accidental deletion
- Solutions for synthesizing intelligence across unstructured data sources
- Customizable retention policies for various laws and regulations
- Easy end-user access to archived content for data retrieval
3. Automation and AI to Simplify Compliance
As the volumes of data generated and collected by financial services companies continues to increase, manual data management can be time-consuming, expensive, and complex. Automation and intelligent tools pave the way for more efficient, accurate compliance strategies.
Automated solutions, like Veritas Alta Classification can automatically classify all content during ingestion, and index content according to your specific policies. The system can identify more than 1,100 data types, using expert-trained patterns. Plus, you can customize your own solutions.
With built-in AI, machine learning, and natural language processing, platforms like this also enable companies to quickly identify risky behavior and surface relevant content to stay ahead of compliance obligations. You can access language detection and sentiment analysis, reinforce defensibility with targeted reviews, and adjust your policies over time to boost performance.
4. Straightforward Search and Review
Once you’ve captured the correct data for your financial services compliance strategy, you also need to ensure you can securely access that information when necessary. An effective surveillance solution should make it simple to manage the entire review process.
Look for a solution that allows you complete control over creating departments, assigning reviewers and permissions, and setting up monitored employees. The bet tools will allow you to schedule searches and samples, conduct reviews, report, export, and audit your data with just a couple of clicks.
An innovative toolkit will give you the freedom to create and control your own workflows, deliver alerts based on your specific needs, and boost your compliance strategy. For instance, Veritas Alta Surveillance comes with built-in intelligent review solutions driven by machine learning, and tools for surfacing relevant content to simplify review workflows.
5. All-in-One Functionality
Managing compliance in the financial sector becomes more complex when you need to leverage multiple different tools for capturing, recording, archiving, and reviewing data. The more distributed your technology, the more risks you’ll face in terms of data silos and security issues.
An all-in-one platform, offering integrated cloud data services will help you to streamline your compliance strategy, and mitigate risks. Look for a vendor that offers an all-in-one solution for capturing, protecting, reviewing, and analyzing data, according to your specific needs.
Some companies can even offer extra value-added services, such as backup as a service, recovery vaults, and intelligent tools for storage resiliency.
Simplify and Improve Financial Surveillance
As compliance standards continue to evolve in the financial sector, it’s becoming increasingly important for companies to upgrade and transform their surveillance strategies. An all-in-one platform, capable of offering automated data capture and retention across multiple platforms is essential to adhering with the regulatory landscape.
Additionally, with the right tools, you’ll be able to enforce and establish data retention policies to suit your needs, mitigate risks with AI and machine learning, and streamline review processes.
To find out more, visit Veritas.
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