THE IMPORTANCE OF CALL RECORDING IN ACCORDANCE TO MIFID II

MiFID II’s introduction in January 2018 means financial organisations across the EU must now keep records of all services, activities and transactions undertaken, which includes the capture and retention (in immutable format and for defined periods) of telephone conversations. 

Therefore, the question isn’t about the importance of call recording - it’s a legal requirement - but rather the importance of having an effective and reliable solution that ensures the capture of high quality audio from across the entire organisation (back, middle and front office, as well as mobile workers) to support adherence to MiFID II requirements. 

Given that MiFID II will cost the finance industry more than €2.5bn to implement*, organisations are also looking at how to extract additional value from RegTech investments and at leveraging the highly valuable data initially captured for regulatory purposes to fuel AI and drive differentiation as part of digital transformation projects. The ability to convert voice from an unstructured audio file to a highly accurate transcript to create a structured data set, is a key part of this. 

For example, financial organisations can use sentiment analysis to better understand customers and to enhance Know Your Customer (KYC) strategies. The ability to search for specific words or phrases across large volumes of data can help support compliance and reduce operational costs, supporting investigations into Anti Money Laundering, as well as making it easier to reconstruct trades. 

At Red Box we’ve identified that, on average, just over half (58%)** of organisation-wide conversations are being captured which we believe is down to mixed telephony estates and often excludes conversations taking place on mobiles. A lack of data sovereignty also appears to be a major pain point, with only 10%** of those surveyed saying their voice data is easily accessible for fuelling AI engines and analytics. Red Box captures voice from 55+ legacy and new systems, and provides customers with full control of their data. Through open APIs, we also connect them to the broadest partner ecosystem of application and value added partners to maximise its value, such as CRM, BI, AI and analytics tools. 

The importance of call recording for compliance with MiFID II is undeniable, but the opportunity is in how organisations use the data, beyond compliance, and the additional value this will enable them to deliver to their customers. 

Richard Stevenson, CEO Red Box 

*According to estimates by consultancy firm Opimas

**Survey conducted by Sapio Research for Red Box, asking 588 IT Directors or C-level executives responsible for IT across UK, US and Singapore