Analytics and Call Recording for Banking and Finance

The finance/banking sector is a highly competitive global marketplace. It is also one of the most heavily regulated with organisations under constant scrutiny to adhere to continued governance such as PCI compliance, Dodd-Frank Act compliance, MIFID II Compliance, and GDPR compliance.

Cyber Security is a top priority as these organisations strive to prevent cyber-threats, hackers and malware. If these companies don’t protect their customers, then they’re going to lose their trust, and a poor reputation can be more harmful to a brand than any fine.

The early adopters in the industry are constantly exploring new technologies to increase workforce mobility and remote working. In contrast, more established firms are still working to move from legacy, locally built communication tools to cloud solutions for flexibility and scale. All are striving to deliver improved customer service and interactions that drive down cost and improve customer satisfaction.

Core Technology Investments

The core technology investments are coming from cloud communications, security of networks and data storage.

Security protection is always a good seller. The area requires continual investment with the focus on network and services security, testing for resilience, and being constantly vigilant in preparing for attacks.

To help customers achieve compliance, our resellers are expanding their provision of audit and monitoring tools. The sector has a legal requirement to record calls, so providers must ensure that call recording technology is up to the job, safe, secure and will protect as well as meet regulatory compliance needs.

Training continues to attract investment. This applies to reseller staff as well as customer employees. Education and awareness amongst staff around highly evolving technology is needed to ensure they are aware, trained and vigilant, and that they can use it properly to adhere to compliance.

Cloud services is expanding fast. More and more resellers are moving from selling physical products to managed services such as secure resilient clouds for hosted apps. The benefit of cloud services is that they deliver valuable analytics and insights to resellers across multiple customers. In addition, cloud services are quick and easy to provision, support and manage with no on-site installation.

A Changing Vertical?

This is a fast-changing market that is particularly impacted by the growth of millennials. These younger financial customers want 24/7 access, social media and easy access on various unified communications mediums.

However, there is still a need to cater for the aging population who may not be so technologically advanced. Financial organisations and their providers must not lose sight of their customers’ wide variety of needs and most specifically, to be aware that the phone still plays a big part in customer service today.

Personalisation of services is another growing requirement. Communicating to such a segmented market can be a challenge but fortunately, as communications move into the cloud it also becomes easier to gain insights and thus improve personalisation.

Considerations for the Channel

Resellers need to go the extra mile to build assurances into their proposition so that if/when a fintech customer is targeted, they know they have the backing and support of a supplier that has built fully documented processes and substantiated security into the proposition. This requires resellers to look for peer-to-peer relationships with suppliers who offer similarly relevant propositions.

Resellers must be able to show how customers can bounce-back and recover after an attack and get back to business-as-usual within acceptable timescales. It’s not enough to rely on the end customer to do risk assessment, it has to be central to the proposition in order to minimise reputational damage. This should cover route-cause analysis, stress test proposition to prove ability, what backup mechanisms are in place such as being able to flip from on-premise to cloud iCT, etc.

We are also seeing more vetting and due diligence by end customers back along the supply chain e.g. ISO 27001, data protection, privacy, ‘assurance-as-a-service’, validation of encryption, resilience and security etc.

Generalist Versus Specialist

The main challenge facing resellers is having to maintain their knowledge of compliance and the increased regulation around continuous monitoring which favours those who specialise in the sector. Those who already have experience delivering agile cloud solutions and mobility will already have a greater understanding of the compliance needs in finance and banking.

The benefit of being a specialist is that they can demonstrate their skills and knowledge to their finance customers and show that they can deliver solutions to real-world problems. This requires highlighting work done elsewhere to build credibility.

They will also need a highly qualified set of products and services that have security and compliance requirements already built-in to deliver piece of mind to their finance and banking customers.

As published by Comms Business.