Compliance is a time-consuming responsibility, a discipline that relies on precision and meticulous oversight. This reputation has been around for some timeeven when regulatory compliance was mostly about email and printed materials compared to the steady stream of today's corporate digital output.
We've gradually seen compliance become more of an industry in its own right, as opposed to just another 'hat' someone has to wear in an organization – something that's been particularly prevalent in smaller businesses. In recent years, 'WhatsApp finesThey alone have reached billions of dollars in non-compliance by the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, adding considerable pressure and scrutiny to corporations.
We have now came to a point where the explosion of communication platforms, regulations and supervisory requirements has made it increasingly challenging to detect non-compliant behaviour. Something has to give for compliance teams to effectively manage their workload and spiraling costs.
Here are five tips for speeding up your compliance workflow!
- Threading and Native Capture
One of the biggest issues around traditional communications archiving is the lack of context associated with captured messages. From WhatsApp to Slack, trying to unify the way employees communicate is difficult without the right tools. Right now, the industry standard is to convert all messages to email threads, resulting in a disjointed reviewer experience that breaks the momentum of a conversation. It's a slow, fragmented process that can also allow non-compliant behavior to go undetected.
Some modern compliance vendors are beginning to recognize this inefficiency, presenting communications in the original channel format with all interactions (comments, reactions, attachments) displayed online to tell the whole story. This valuable feature presents conversations in a linear fashion and allows users to review communications logically.
- Artificial Intelligence
While it is very much an everyday technology, there is a reason why AI has been adopted in such a significant part of global industry; can facilitate major improvements in data processing and analysis. The volume of communications that compliance teams must review has increased 10 to 15 times over the past 10 to 15 years, so the ability to 'learn' non-compliant behavior and bring it to the attention of the compliance officer is clearly with interest.
However, while AI and machine learning are important, the industry is still struggling with how to properly implement them for compliance purposes. Just as regulators themselves are discussing how chatbot-generated content impacts existing regulatory frameworks, compliance vendors are ensuring they have all the data needed to take the transformative steps required.
Compliance is an exact science, so shooting for a moving target is relatively pointless.
- unItIng
The number of digital channels embedded in corporate and everyday life is already significant and ever-expanding. Compliance is starting to arrive, with its attractive penalties for the use of “out-of-channel” communications such as WhatsApp, SMS and iMessage from 2021. As a result, there is an expanding catalog of platforms that must be monitored and reviewed daily.
Not all vendors can capture every platform, and many firms find themselves working with a variety of different solutions to ensure there are no areas of compliance vulnerability. This is inefficient—context switching always is—especially when you consider the different functionality across multiple platforms.
Where possible, regulated firms should identify a vendor capable of storing all their disparate data behind a single pane of glass.
- Website changes
After the presentation of the SEC marketing rule in 2022, it has become clear that consumer protection in digital spaces is a priority for regulators. Websites are a company's primary market, and so archaic statutes were updated to reflect the modern consumer experience. Firms need to spot fundamental changes to a website that could impact the consumer, and the ability to quickly detect these changes allows the compliance team to laser-focus on the content itself.
This type of function is difficult to get right and can create more work if executed poorly. With a variety of options on the market, from text changes to visual overlays and more, it's worth doing your research and finding a solution that works best for your team.
- Transcription
Business habits in a post-pandemic world are one completely different proposition. In short, many more meetings are happening online (returning to the office did not reduce the frequency of this). Non-compliance is as prevalent in oral as in written communications, and so amid the growing regulatory focus on electronic communications oversight, the next step has long been anticipated to be increased control around video calls.
Therefore, transcription is a vital feature, allowing compliance teams to scan transcribed content quickly after the event has occurred. To take the improvement a step further, the ability to click on the content marked in the transcription (inconsistent conditions, for example, caused by lexicon policies) allows for great efficiency and a higher success rate after long encounters when users simply want to review potentially incompatible terms rather than analyzing the entire transcript.
Get to the point
These five tips are largely interrelated, and not surprisingly, each focuses on organizing data to surface relevant information. It is vital that compliance teams can cut through the vast expanses of communications for which they are increasingly held accountable.
In 2025, each of the above features should be implemented or evaluated by your vendor as compliance requirements continue to escalate. The industry is filled with established providers stuck with outdated systems that don't have the necessary capability to handle evolving demands.
When buying or upgrading your compliance vendor, it's important to ask the right questions and ensure your team will be skillfully supported with agile technology that helps them find the needles in more and more haystacks.
Harriet Christie is the Chief Operating Officer of MirrorWeb, a communications surveillance solution based in Manchester, UK.