There’s a growing challenge for highly regulated industries such as financial services and insurance, that the complex and personalised products they sell require stringent regulation – but are best sold through detailed interactions with specialist sales advisers.
These salespeople typically want to adopt the latest UCaaS tools and collaboration platforms to conduct their calls with the interactivity such platforms offer, but the businesses themselves have to tread carefully, and have a tendency to be cautious of new technologies – they’re typically subject to complex regimens of retention and supervision from the likes of MiFID II, FINRA, and the SEC, and have to record, retain, and audit call recordings and other unified communications to identify risks and investigate non-compliance. In fact, the rise in the use of collaboration platforms in Financial Services led FINRA to explicitly state that firms using collaboration platforms “must preserve records of business-related communications and supervise the activities and communications of those persons on the application.”
Theta Lake provides the solution: a modern compliance foundation, which not only captures and analyses all elements of every interaction for possible risk, it enables efficient archiving, eDiscovery, and compliance review.
Unlike random sampling, this next-generation automated intelligent tool brings unprecedented speed, rigour, and added-value to the process — enabling 100% of employee interactions to be retained, managed and supervised in new ways.
Theta Lake brings new compliance powers to Cisco Webex
Theta Lake’s AI-based archiving, eDiscovery and supervision is now integrated directly into Cisco’s Webex Meetings and Teams. Running continually to analyse recordings from every video, audio, and chat communication, natural language processing (NLP) surfaces regulatory, compliance, and conduct risks across all channels.
As Anthony Cresci, VP Business Development and Operations at Theta Lake, explains, the very richness of interaction today’s UCaaS offers creates risk, because of the multitude of ways a breach can now occur:
“I can now share a confidential document via screen share, hold it up in front of my camera, share it through the chat of a Webex Meeting, or send through my Webex Teams as part of a chat message.”
“Since these channels have gone largely unsupervised there is a higher likelihood of misconduct or risky behaviour occurring”
Theta Lake thus acts as a business enabler, helping organisations in highly-regulated sectors get on board with the latest UCaaS tools, that they have thus far been unable to access due to compliance risks:
“Providing complete visibility into employee communications by capturing all of the content across Webex Meetings and Teams, automating the process for identifying compliance risks, to even using AI to assist the review process, enables compliance, risk, and legal teams to create a more modern, effective, and efficient supervision program for their unified communications.”
With automated compliance, it’s a win-win
Automating compliance is good for everyone, including the agents involved, as Cresci explained, “Since 2009, financial institutions have faced $340bn fines for misconduct, and in most cases, there are one or two bad actors who are responsible. Not only are the penalties significant, but it has a negative impact on brand reputation, employee morale, and shareholder value – so it’s not only a regulatory requirement to retain and supervise communications but also in the best interest of the organisation.
“Theta Lake goes further, by offering tools to train and advise users on ways they can more safely use collaboration tools, and protect the organisation and themselves from compliance violations”
“This provides insights for managers on who the riskiest users are within the organisation, along with a log of their actions.”
The native Webex integration enables administrators to structure a comprehensive surveillance program without creating any burden on end-users. Admins have access to over 40+ pre-built policies powered by natural language processing and deep learning to surface precisely relevant violations and risks, customise workflows, set long-term retention periods for communications, and perform rich eDiscovery.
As regulated industries face growing communication regulation and increased accountability regimes, having an affordable and manageable way of automating compliance will be key for competitive success. Tools like Theta Lake directly integrated into familiar communications hubs are the most efficient and effective way for organisations to identify data leakage, misconduct, and high-risk behaviour, while archiving and learning in real-time from the data their interactions create.
