Advancing Mobile Capture Solutions to Meet Evolving Compliance Needs
The business world has become more intertwined with mobile than ever before. Across industries, professionals are on the move, adopting a work-from-anywhere approach to conducting business. The convergence of digital communications and hybrid work has created flexibility and also presented challenges with both corporate-issued devices and employees' personal devices. Today's business communications can include voice, text and enterprise collaboration suites like Microsoft and Zoom on mobile devices. And, as our work posture evolves — from office to home and now hybrid — employees are more frequently meeting their clients where they are on consumer applications like WhatsApp and WeChat.
The need for stricter policies and better technology
Given the substantial fines issued by the SEC and other regulatory bodies this year for recordkeeping violations with personal devices and consumer applications, managing compliance gaps has become challenging and costly.
A compliance gap is the difference between the tools approved for use and defined within policies by your firm versus the tools that are actually used in practice. Given the nature of technology innovation, that gap can expand, contract, or more, but it doesn't go away.
Businesses have been forced to choose between enablement or prohibition when it comes to mobile devices and applications. Both choices require firms to monitor for violations and enforce procedures; however, embracing these channels and enabling compliant use — through strict policies, procedures and purpose-built technology — could facilitate greater employee productivity.
Regardless of the approach to these channels, strict policies around mobile devices and their use are vital in highly regulated industries such as financial services, insurance and utilities. Failing to comply with mobile regulations will result in costly fines and reputational damages.
Organizations seek to validate their policies with solutions to reduce risk and enable mobile compliance. This covers a broad set of use cases:
- Corporate devices: Voice and/or text messaging may need to be captured for archive and supervision
- Bring your own device (BYOD): Enabling voice and/or text messaging services on an employee device using a business number that can be captured for archive and supervision
- Enterprise collaboration: Ensuring Microsoft 365 and Zoom communications can be captured for archive and supervision
- Consumer apps: Bridging a high-risk surface area to enable the capture of WhatsApp, WeChat, Signal and Telegram for voice and/or messaging
Ensuring mobile capture compliance
The hybrid workforce is constantly evolving, and regulated industries must adapt with better technology solutions to support goals and enable employees and customers to do business. Digital communications data is a juggernaut enveloped by growing scrutiny from regulatory organizations in North America, Europe and elsewhere.
“A wide variety of popular mobile-driven, instant messaging apps have become essential for doing business worldwide, even as the variety, volume and velocity of data that such apps produce pose real risks.”
With approximately 4 billion instant messages sent daily, organizations need to understand that a substantial portion of those are sent using corporate devices or sanctioned employee personal devices.
Compliance challenges with the hybrid workforce
While organizations have adjusted to the new norm of hybrid work, many have not yet adjusted to the compliance issues a distributed workforce creates. When employees venture outside of the office walls, they're connecting at any time and in multiple ways — usually on their customers' terms — which expands surface risks. The use of mobile devices presents new compliance threats due to their access to sanctioned and unsanctioned channels that require frequent risk monitoring, management and process enforcement. Managing vast amounts of digital information across an ever-growing risk surface is a daunting task, but one that can be easily accomplished with the right solution — one solution even.
The Smarsh Capture Mobile Suite offers a selection of solutions that meets all mobile compliance needs, whether it be voice or message capture on corporate-owned devices, personal devices, consumer applications, or collaboration platforms.
Our suite features expanded telecom carrier and support of essential consumer apps to deliver unmatched communications capture. Capture Mobile empowers organizations to fulfill regulatory compliance requirements enforced by the SEC, FINRA, Dodd-Frank, MiFID, FCA and IIROC.
This single solution enables organizations to capture mobile communications in their native format while collecting broader context for retention and supervision purposes. Smarsh has enhanced its suite to provide improved functionality to organizations that use end-to-end encrypted mobile communications apps, including WhatsApp, WeChat, Signal, Telegram and other popular instant messaging apps.
While regulations continue to evolve and grow more complex, Capture Mobile reduces the complexity of solving mobile compliance issues while making it easier for firms to conduct their business without the fear of fines.
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Smarsh
Scalable for organizations of all sizes, the Smarsh platform provides customers with compliance built on confidence. It enables them to strategically future-proof as new communication channels are adopted, and to realize more insight and value from the data in their archive. Customers strengthen their compliance and e-discovery initiatives and benefit from the productive use of email, social media, mobile/text messaging, instant messaging and collaboration, web, and voice channels.
Smarsh serves a global client base that spans the top banks in North America and Europe, along with leading brokerage firms, insurers, and registered investment advisors. Smarsh also enables state and local government agencies to meet their public records and e-discovery requirements. For more information, visit www.smarsh.com.
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