Despite a regulatory crackdown that saw the SEC issue $200 million in fines and other global regulators warn against shoddy record-keeping, a new report reveals financial services firms are still failing to record wider company and marketing information.
The Global Relay analysis of anonymized internal data from more than 10,000 banking, broker-dealer, fund management and other regulated financial services firms reveals that email remains the most commonly recorded communication channel with 89% of accounts capturing this data, while only 33% capture LinkedIn data.
Only 8% of firms are capturing SMS/texts for business communication, with even fewer storing WhatsApp data despite that app being the main culprit in the SEC’s recent Wall Street crackdown. While few organizations are capturing this data now, the number that are is growing, with accounts adopting WhatsApp storage rising more than 400% since the regulatory crackdown. The report’s authors warn that low adoption of WhatsApp capture could have more to do with the time it takes to consider and implement such a strategy than lack of awareness on the part of compliance teams.
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Read moreA few other key findings:
- 10% of financial services firms are capturing and storing communications published on their own websites.
- 3% of finserv firms have connected Zoom video to their archive.
- Private equity, hedge funds and wealth managers (about 19%) are more likely than investment managers and broker-dealers (about 8%) to capture Slack communications, while broker-dealers are the most likely of all to capture email communications: 97% compared to just 86% of hedge funds and wealth managers.
