The cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) continue to increase relentlessly, making it more evident for financial services firms that their work from home lock-down will be extended longer than expected. With broker-dealers and financial advisors communicating more with their clients through texts, voice calls, and instant messaging apps than ever, firms are facing a higher non-compliance risks with the mobile archiving requirements of FINRA, SEC, MIFID II, FCA, IIROC, among others.
FINRA, in particular, has advised firms to set up a remote work policy for their employees, while also granting extensions for firms that need more time to respond to inquiries, filing deadlines or investigations. according to their latest Notice.
FINRA advises firms that will need to use remote offices or telework arrangements during the pandemic to “…establish and maintain a supervisory system that is reasonably designed to supervise the activities of each associated person while working from an alternative or remote location during the pandemic.”
The regulator also reminded member firms to tighten their cybersecurity measures as employees use their personal devices and communicate through text messaging, calls, and instant messaging with their clients.
TeleMessage is dedicated to helping financial companies and other regulated organizations comply with record retention laws and regulations and allow their employees to work productively and securely in their homes amidst the outbreak through our suite of Mobile Archiver products:
Whether equipped with their personal mobile phone or company-issued device, remote workers need a robust and flexible solution that can capture and retain all their mobile communications without disrupting their daily work activities. TeleMessage’s Mobile Archiver solutions are designed to capture messages from every mobile communication platform that remote workers use –mobile SMS and voice call to social media and WhatsApp.
With our Network Archiver and Android Archiver, remote workers can use their native mobile SMS and phone call apps without the need to record SMS messages, and capture voice calls manually. Even with many different mobile carriers, these solutions can store the captured messages centrally in one server. Moreover, the Network Archiver can also work on legacy phones and does not require an app installation, enabling employees to stay productive as they use native messaging and voice call apps with which they are familiar.
Security is exceptionally vital for companies with remote employees that will be using their personal device for work purposes. TeleMessage offers our Secure Messaging solution, which is equipped with end-to-end encryption that guarantees full compliance with various data protection regulations. It works on iOS, Android, Web, and Outlook, thus enabling remote employees to communicate securely with their clients and co-workers while maintaining privacy over their personal devices.
If the remote worker doesn’t want to use a separate secure messaging app, the Enterprise Number Archiver is an app that provides a second number that can serve as their work phone number for their BYOD device. With this app activated, companies can archive all text messages, voice calls, and other mobile communications of their employees. It can also forward seamlessly the captured messages to the company’s preferred data archiving vendor of choice.
Companies with work from home employees can also continue using WhatsApp in a compliant way through our WhatsApp Archiver solutions – the WhatsApp Phone Archiver and WhatsApp Cloud Archiver. Initially popular among freelancers because of its robust security and collaboration features, WhatsApp has been a tool of choice by many employees in the regulated sector, so it is also imperative to have a system in place that can capture and record messages in this app.
Our WhatsApp Phone Archiver has the same interface and capabilities of WhatsApp, all with the needed features required to capture all chats: groups or individuals, text, multimedia, documents, and even deleted messages. Companies can also automatically forward WhatsApp to the email of their choice, allowing for more efficient search and view of archived messages, and improved corporate data archiving.
The WhatsApp Cloud Archiver is designed to support companies that use the enterprise version of WhatsApp, the WhatsApp Business app. With this solution, messages, including: text, images, audio clips, multimedia, and files made through WhatsApp can be automatically captured and retained in the corporate archive. It also doesn’t require remote employees to install any different application in their phone, so they can immediately use their WhatsApp mobile app without any interruption as work from their home.
Our experts are always here to help and educate on how your organization can implement a work from home policy and address compliance and security issues that come with it. Contact us at Tel: +1 (978) 2631015 or visit our website at www.telemessage.com to learn more about our mobile archiving products.
