As coronavirus continues to cripple companies and organizations across the world, more and more governments are tightening travel and work restrictions as well. For regulated entities in the financial and government sector, these restrictions have severely disrupted their operations.
One aspect of ensuring business continuity in times of a crisis is implementing critical compliance and oversight activities such as communications monitoring. Business continuity stretches from simply providing employees the communication tools and platforms they need to communicate with their clients and colleagues.
They also have to understand the utilization of compliance tools such as mobile archiving solutions that will record SMS messages, record voice calls and capture WhatsApp chats from their device. Such records are not just an asset to protect the organization during a disaster, but a system to help them know what their employees are up to, and most importantly, to give the regulators an insight of what actions they have been conducting throughout work-at-home setup.
Aside from text messaging and voice calling, new communication platforms such as WhatsApp are readily available for work-at-home employees. WhatsApp, a secured messaging app that can be used to send and receive messages, make calls, and attach important business files in group chats, has become one of the top communication tools among employees due to its wide variety of features. It can also be used on mobile, web, and desktop, making it an ideal cross-platform collaboration tool during a crisis.
While regulatory agencies are providing relief from their regulatory requirements, they don’t necessarily mean that companies and organizations are exempted from recording official business communication during the pandemic.
In the financial sector, regulators have made the following points clear in their regulatory guidance amidst coronavirus pandemic:
- FINRA – FINRA still expects firms to establish and maintain a supervisory system that is reasonably designed to monitor the activity of every associated person while working remotely during the pandemic.
- SEC – While SEC has acknowledged the supervision challenges that companies face under the present circumstances, the agency has also reminded adviser to continuously evaluate their obligations under the Federal security laws, especially the Best Interest rule.
- FCA – The UK regulator also issue guidance that emphasized the need for financial institutions to ensure that their business continuity plans include transparent communications, as well as to take reasonable steps to achieve efficient call reporting.
- ESMA – According to the regulator’s public statement, firms that allow certain employees “to use mobile devices to undertake activities relating to transactions” are required to “establish, implement and maintain an effective recording of telephone conversations and electronic communications policy.
What these regulators say is for financial companies to have a strategy in place to capture text messages and record voice calls of their employees for supervision purposes, at least until the pandemic is over and done. Once the crisis has passed, they can significantly benefit from the strategy they used as they can make it a core aspect of their business continuity plan.
In the government sector, the narrative is relatively the same. While some government agencies are temporarily not accepting public records requests, they are still bound to comply with the FOIA record retention rule.
Non-compliance with FOIA’s record retention rule can be very costly, and can lead to disruption. Just recently, a Florida city had to pay a settlement worth $45,000 for violating the Sunshine Law. In essence, the city could not properly produce text messages in response to a public records request.
How TeleMessage Can Help in Record Request Response During COVID-19 Pandemic
Not many regulated organizations saw the coronavirus pandemic coming, which has caused them not to have a strategy that will ensure their regulatory compliance throughout the crisis. Worse, the compliance risks that these companies struggled to address before the pandemic started have increased markedly, which could put their operations at a higher probability of being suspended, once everything goes back to normal again.
With TeleMessage, companies forced to adopt a work from home policy due to coronavirus can effectively record SMS message and help regulated entities achieve effective WhatsApp archiving for their remote employees. TeleMessage Mobile Archiver is a set of enterprise messaging solution that effectively addresses compliance, regulatory, and eDiscovery response requirements and which reduces risk across the financial, government, and healthcare sectors.
TeleMessage captures and records mobile content, including mobile SMS, voice calls, and WhatsApp chats and calls from corporate or BYOD mobile phones. Messages are securely and reliably retained within TeleMessage servers or forwarded to an archiving data storage vendor of your choice.
Our mobile archiving products securely record content from mobile carriers and mobile devices for a variety of ownership models (BYOD, CYOD, and employer-issued). With our multiple archiving solutions, you can always find the right tools or blend for your requirements:
TeleMessage offers cross-carrier and international mobile text & calls archiving for corporate and BYOD phones. Visit our website at www.telemessage.com to learn more about our mobile archiving products.
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