It’s clear that enterprise text messaging is a communications tool here to stay. This is certainly true for the financial services industry, which mobility has created important opportunities to increase employee productivity and customer engagement. In fact, 80 percent of financial services companies are currently using or planning to use global SMS texting with their customers or employees, according to a study released by research firm IDC. In addition, 88 percent of financial services organizations believe that mobile messaging has a considerable or major impact on customer experience.
With that, mobile communication on personal devices has introduced new challenges, including security concerns, increased regulatory scrutiny and the need to maintain regulatory compliance in search for robust enterprise text messaging solutions.
An array of compliance mandates and regulatory agencies confronts financial services organizations—SOX, FINRA, SEC, GLB and the Dodd-Frank Act in the U.S.; FSA and FCA in the U.K.; and GDPR and MiFID II in Europe, to name a few. And lack of attention to mobile communications can expose firms to compliance risks, specifically those unable to address archiving.
How can secure texting message applications address security and compliance and provide a complete enterprise text messaging solution?
- Safely text with clients & colleagues, and send documents, photos and other sensitive files.
- Allows employees to use their own iOS or Android devices, promoting a BYOD culture and save the company money.
- Can be used on multiple devices, including smartphone, tablet or computer and also connect to enterprise systems via APIs.
- Encrypt data both in transit and in rest.
- Log, track and archive messages for auditing purposes.
- Know when messages have been sent, delivered and read with message confirmations.
- Authenticate senders’ & recipients’ identities to make sure that corporate information stays in the appropriate hands.
- Administrative control: manage users and their permissions, enforce policies, remote lock & wipe and generate reports.
- Remove opportunities for inadvertent human error—the leading cause of security breaches in the financial industry!
Additionally, an enterprise text messaging tool can also improve communication exchanges for better workflow by distributing information in real-time concerning (1) alerts about system status or network outages, (2) followfed by emergency alerts to employees (3) customer surveys; and (4) customer alerts, updates and notifications.
Financial services firms are slowly adapting secure enteprise text messaging solutions to solve individual pain points, however, as the data suggests, this new technology will spill-over to address other communications challenges within the financial services sector.