1. Regulatory change and political uncertainty

Regulations are continuously changing and, particularly as many financial services organisations operate globally, it can be difficult to make sure that measures are in place to comply with evolving requirements. With Brexit deal negotiations continuing and the exit date rapidly looming, financial institutions who deal with clients in the UK and the EU will be facing uncertainty when it comes to compliance.

Recording information is a key requirement for the majority of financial regulators around the world. There are varying standards depending on the country of operation, such as the US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or the International Financial Reporting Standards, meaning that recording information can use vast amounts of company resources.

The solution to record keeping compliance worries is an agile call capture service with no limits on storage. Financial services organisations can record their calls and store them for as long as they need to – keeping them for 5-7 years to comply with regulations such as MiFID II at no extra cost.

2. Data protection and cybersecurity

With sensitive information being shared with banks every day by customers, data protection is a key challenge for banks. Regulations such as the GDPR can result in fines of up to 4% of annual turnover for firms that fail to comply with data protection laws. Not only is data protection a legal requirement, banks can leverage their information security policies to engender trust in their customers.

Cybersecurity is at the forefront of the minds of risk and compliance managers, as they work to protect the vast amounts of sensitive information that financial institutions process. Further regulations such as PCI DSS and SOX require formal data security policies, communication of data security policies, and consistent enforcement of data security policies.

Advances in cloud technology can really help with the burden of compliance, with secure and geographically redundant data centres ensuring the safe processing and storage of consumer conversations. Data can be encrypted and access can be restricted to reduce risk.

Data also provides a unique opportunity for financial service providers to learn more about their customers and improve products and processes within their organisations. The unstructured data held within customer communications can initially seem inaccessible, but with voice AI it can be transformed into actionable intelligence that can fuel business decisions.

3. Fintech disruptors

Established banks are beginning to feel the threat of newer, more agile players within the financial services industry. The introduction of open banking in the UK has made it even easier for fintech disruptors to lure customers away with easier switching and more competitive offerings. This initiative was introduced by the government to encourage competition in an industry that has previously been dominated by a handful of powerful institutions.

Traditional banks are realising that they will need to innovate, and embrace technology that will allow them to become more agile. This extends to compliance, where technology can facilitate adaptation to changing requirements and create a more proactive approach to risk mitigation. This forward-thinking culture of compliance utilises AI to perform in-depth data analysis to provide insightful reporting that can identify and minimise risky activity. With automated reports and customisable alerts, supervisors and managers can reduce undesirable behaviours without increasing their workloads.

Embracing the potential of technology gives financial institutions the ability to differentiate themselves from the competition and win the trust of their customers by demonstrating their commitment to risk management and data protection.

4. Minimising risk

Regulations put on financial services organisations largely focus on transparency in their aim to increase trust and protect consumers. With adequate data gathering and surveillance capabilities, firms can identify and minimise violations such as insider trading.

A recording solution that can track and timestamp conversations, and allows for quick and easy search and retrieval of information will give firms the upper hand in compliance and risk management. Voice AI that can detect keywords and send tailored alerts to management makes it quicker and easier to detect and deter suspicious trading activities to prevent penalties from regulators.

Talk to a member of the Dubber team to find out how our services can ease the burden of financial compliance.

Regulatory drivers such as MiFID II and the Dodd-Frank Act require the secure and accurate recording and long-term storage of conversations relating to financial transactions. Where once on-premise call recording that captured conversations made on fixed lines in an office were a partial, and expensive, solution to this directive, with many people working from home, they no longer offer full compliance coverage.

While web- and app-based recording may seem like a solution to this problem, these options can come with risks of insecure storage and can’t provide the instant discoverability required by regulators. The only way to record every conversation from a dispersed workforce is to find a solution that can record every call, no matter where it takes place.

Unified Call Recording enables organisations to meet compliance requirements by collecting and storing voice data at scale and across devices and channels. By recording directly from the service provider network, organisations can record calls not just from fixed lines but from mobiles and any IP connected device. It doesn’t matter where in the world employees are working from, the company can rest assured that their conversations will be accurately captured and securely stored in the cloud.

All voice data is protected with AES-256 encryption and is stored in regional data centres for sovereignty. There aren’t any limits on recordings or storage. Businesses can capture as many minutes of calls as they need and store them for as long as their compliance requirements specify. They can even set a limit on their data retention so that recorded calls are automatically deleted. This prevents businesses from holding on to old or outdated data for too long and ensures the information they have is relevant.

Compliance box ticked: what’s next?

Financial services organisations are looking for a solution that will reduce the cost and complexity of meeting compliance requirements. But as well as ticking the box for the compliance basics, they want to go above and beyond to ensure that their organisation is operating effectively.

What if their call recording solution could do more than just capture conversations? What if it used AI to allow a business to conduct its own investigations into employee conduct? What if AI transcribed each and every call, allowing users to search for a recorded conversation by a single word that was spoken?

Automation is the future

When every recorded call is transcribed, there is an accurate record of what was said that can be referred to in the event of an investigation. But this is just the beginning. Transcription can automate processes that can enable a more proactive examination of company practices.

Organisations can identify keywords that indicate policy breaches and create early warning systems through automated alerts for such keywords. Emails can be sent to supervisors to warn of suspicious activity and, through an API, these actions can trigger processes in existing business applications. Transcription also facilitates keyword search, allowing users to find conversations based on a word spoken during a call – just like an email.

Transcribing speech to text also opens up huge opportunities to learn more about an organisation’s customers and also their internal processes. Voice data can be exported to be integrated with other business data to get a 360º view of a company – allowing for analysis within business intelligence tools to identify trends and opportunities for improvement.

Get in touch with a member of the team to find out how financial services organisations are getting the compliance and performance edge with Dubber.

Voice data has been a long ignored or inaccessible pool of business insights critical to addressing compliance, customer experience and business performance. The inability to convert voice-based interactions internally and externally has reduced telecommunication carriers to providing connections. This has precluded them from the data race and using AI to develop new service offerings based on big data sets.

Deloitte found that, in organisations adopting AI, more than 80% of business leaders see AI as “very” or “critically” important to their business success. Some researchers have even predicted that AI could become a “general-purpose technology” – one that will transform every industry and society at large.

The power source of AI is data, and telecommunications service providers have a great opportunity to offer businesses access to this AI fuel. With 92% of all customer interactions happening over the phone, the data being created is vast – but it’s not being used to its full potential. Traditionally, if calls have been recorded at all, the capture of voice data has been limited by on-premise storage. Any data that has been recorded has been siloed and represents only a fraction of the total communications taking place. Not anymore.

Don’t leave voice data out

Businesses surveyed about their AI priorities by PWC stated that their top data challenges were identifying, collecting or aggregating data across their organisation, and integrating AI and analytics systems to gain business insights. Unstructured data, such as recorded calls, was seen as a problem to collect or make sense of. Only 18% of businesses take advantage of this data as part of their AI strategy. This is a significant opportunity for telecommunications service providers to give businesses access to data that has traditionally seemed out of reach.

It is precisely this kind of data that can give a comprehensive view of customers. Executives who say unstructured data is one of the most valuable sources of insights are 24% more likely to have exceeded their business goals, according to a survey by Deloitte. Unfortunately many companies are discovering that understanding customer journeys and making tailored offers is difficult to achieve with traditional premise-based analytics.

Telecommunications service providers have an opportunity to take the conversations happening on their global networks and deliver value from them. Currently telecom networks passively enable the exchange of data, when they could be actively enabling access to the value held within that data. If they don’t act fast, OTT players may make them redundant by building their own networks – Google and Facebook already are.

The call recording backbone for telecommunications

We created Dubber to empower service providers and businesses alike. By recording calls directly on the network, we enable service providers to provide recording and voice AI services for businesses of all sizes. By building our platform in the cloud, we have reduced the cost of data storage by removing the need for expensive proprietary software and hardware.

It’s not just our cloud storage and processing opportunities that make our platform so appealing, but the data modernisation capabilities. We can migrate existing data from on-premise solutions to the cloud to unify the voice data of a business and enable 360^o analysis. Data modernisation offers substantial cost savings. 32% of businesses surveyed by Deloitte identified cost and performance as the top drivers for moving to the cloud, with 91% listing cloud platforms as their primary data storage method. Of the remaining 9% that stored their data on premise, nearly all planned to migrate to the cloud.

Removing the technical barriers to AI insights

Making voice data as accessible as possible is one of our passions. Not only do we democratise call recording through our cloud subscription service, with Dubber AI we also make it easy to extract the data held within calls for analysis. Businesses can easily view call information – including full transcripts, sentiment ratings, and tone analysis – to get a real insight into customer satisfaction.

You don’t need to be an expert in data science. Small businesses will be taking their first steps into the world of data and AI and won’t have the technical skills or budgets required to hire data scientists. With the Dubber platform, they can access easy-to-use services (including ready-to-use Google Data Studio templates) that address these shortfalls: all without having to make big upfront investments. By giving access to AI as a service we’re giving all companies the ability to use it now.

And by partnering with telecommunications service providers around the world to democratise access to voice data, all a business has to do is switch the service on.

Keeping compliant with data protection laws, such as the GDPR, PCI DSS, or information security standards like ISO 27001, requires not only securing data effectively, but also deleting the data when you no longer have a legitimate purpose to store it. With Unified Call Recording from Dubber, you can ensure that recorded calls comply with data retention periods, and are secured effectively. The latest update to be released to the Dubber platform includes the option to set a retention period for recordings, allowing companies to comply with data protection legislation more easily.

Why do I need data retention periods?

The retention period is the length of time you store customer and supplier records for business or compliance purposes before the data is deleted. Erasign data after it is no longer required is important as it reduces the risk of keeping unnecessary, inaccurate, or out of date information.

While the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) doesn’t set out any specific minimum or maximum periods for keeping customer and supplier data, it does state that you must keep data no longer than is necessary for the purpose you obtained it for.

If you process debit or credit card information, you may be subject to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Similarly, if you intend to comply with ISO 27001, the international standard that describes best practice for information security, you must take note of its requirements. These compliance requirements will dictate what information must be included in your information security policy and the rules you should follow. A simple data retention policy will address: the types of information the policy covers, how long you are entitled to keep the information, and what you should do with data when you no longer have a legitimate purpose to store it.

What are data retention best practices?

• You must not keep personal data for longer than necessary
• You need to be able to justify how long you store personal data. This will depend on why you are storing the data
• You should have a data retention policy that sets standard retention periods, in order to comply with documentation requirements
• You should periodically review the data you hold, and delete or anonymize it when no longer required
• In some jurisdictions, individuals have a right to erasure and you should be ready to delete data on request
• Personal data should only be retained for longer periods if it is for public interest archiving, scientific or historical research, or statistical purposes

How do I set a data retention period?

Data protection regulations around the world require enterprises to ensure that personal data from their consumers is deleted after a specified period. These requirements will vary by region and industry. With retention periods, businesses can customise their plan so that recordings are deleted according to their exact compliance needs. Retention periods can be altered as required so that organisations can adapt to changing regulations.

While your voice data is stored within the Dubber platform, you can be sure that the security measures will protect against any data breaches. The platform offers a level of encryption and reliability not seen in on-premise storage, with significantly reduced risk of damage, theft, or tampering. Alternative approaches to call recording such as in-app recording means a lack of control over who has recorded calls, where they are stored, and who has access to the voice data. Enterprises must ensure that their information security policy protects against this kind of risky behaviour.

What about complying with financial services regulations?

Legislation such as MiFID II in the EU requires financial services organisations to record calls containing financial advice, but these must be deleted after 5 or 7 years, depending on the country. With the new retention periods feature, financial institutions can set a maximum length of time for recorded calls to be stored within the Dubber platform. Once this period has been reached, these recordings and their associated AI data will automatically be deleted.

Do I need a special plan?

Retention periods are available as standard on our Call Dub and Dubber AI plans, at no additional cost, and are enabled as default within account settings. These services are both all inclusive, with a full range of recording features and unlimited storage, retention and minutes per month: ensuring no worries about running out of space. Dubber AI comes with added voice AI functionality, including transcription, sentiment and tone analysis, and customisable automated alerts.

To find out more about how Dubber’s Unified Call Recording is helping businesses meet their compliance requirements, click here to chat to one of our team.