EE rolls out mobile voice recording for financial services firms
EE is offering mobile voice recording for traders in the City of London
UK operator EE has launched mobile voice recording services to help UK organisations to fully comply with the FCA’s mobile trading regulations.
Mobile voice recording was introduced as a requirement in the UK in November 1011 for all investment firms including banks, stockbrokers, investment managers and hedge funds. The rules state that calls must be recorded and stored for a period of six months, and firms must take reasonable steps to prevent relevant conversations taking place on private mobiles and other private devices.
The EE solution automatically records all calls. There are no apps to access the service, nor any prefix numbers. The service was jointly developed with Etrali Trading Solutions, which had already collaborated with Bloomberg to collect data from phone calls and feeds it into Bloomberg Vault for compliance purposes.
“Mobile voice recording has the potential to be a real game-changer for the industry,” said Robert Powell, global head of compliance at Etrali Trading Solutions. “Users get a quality mobile call experience without having to install an app, change SIMs or use a virtual operator, while compliance teams can easily search for and recover recorded conversations, and apply advanced analytics to meet increasing regulatory requirements.”
Data can be stored either on Etrali’s cloud infrastructure through a secure online portal, or streamed directly to an organisation’s own system. The service is available on a per-user licence basis and can be integrated into the customer’s existing voice recording infrastructure without data being stored in the cloud.
Other firms active in the mobile call recording space include TeleWare, which has its own solution based on changing the SIM in the trader’s phone, which then captures the call automatically. The firm has its own core network, and also buys capacity from mobile operator networks where necessary. Call recording is likely to expand in Europe in the near future, as the European Commission’s upcoming MiFID II legislation contains an obligation for all buy- and sell-side firms across the EU to record their traders’ mobile phone calls.
“The evolution of mobile recording has already seen the SIM-based approach prevail over software clients and now MNOs are gradually moving in to compete against MVNOs, said Rik Turner, senior analyst, financial services technology, Ovum. “It is Ovum’s opinion they will win and call recording will become a tick-box option in enterprises’ contracts with their mobile provider.”
