No more call recording allowances from FCA

The FCA has ended its lockdown leeway for UK bankers. From now on, they must record all of their conversations while working from home. The authority had previously granted an exemption from these requirements when the UK went into its first lockdown in March 2020.

In guidance issued on January 12th 2021, the FCA stated:

“At the start of the pandemic, if your firm moved to an alternative site or a working from home arrangement, we asked you to consider the broader control environment in view of the new circumstances.

Given the extensive duration of these arrangements, we now expect you to record all relevant communications (including voice calls) when working outside the office.

You should continue to take all steps to prevent market abuse risks. This could include enhanced monitoring, or retrospective reviews. We will continue to monitor for market abuse and, if necessary, take action.”

Prime Minister Boris Johnson once again told the country to stay at home on January 4th 2021, following a rapid rise in COVID-19 infections due to a more transmissible new variant of the virus. The order stated that people could only go to work if they could not reasonably do so from home.

While the FCA made allowances for home workers during previous stay at home orders, call recording requirements now apply to bankers working remotely.

How can banks keep up with surveillance requirements?

With remote workers communicating across devices, networks, and a range of communications platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex, banks are finding it increasingly difficult to capture all conversations in compliance with monitoring requirements. Call recording is no longer application-specific and needs to be unified.

By capturing calls directly from the network with a Unified Call Recording (UCR) solution, firms can capture conversations from mobile devices across wireless and IP connections. Shifting to a cloud solution frees financial institutions from the restrictions of application-specific and infrastructure-based call recording normally confined to call centre environments. UCR offers a cloud-native solution that records directly from the network to complement remote working.

How UCR works

UCR is a core requirement for any company that wants a single source of truth across their whole business.

Where legacy call recording only captured calls from on-premise systems and held them in local storage, UCR is not limited to one location or application. Today, businesses communicate across multiple devices and platforms, and UCR is designed precisely to work alongside a dispersed workforce. Whether a business communicates via mobile devices or platforms such as Microsoft Teams, UCR sits within the network to capture their conversations and store them securely in the cloud for immediate access and management.

A previous version of this post was published on the Dubber blog.