Telco and IT systems failures have been featuring with alarming regularity in the press in recent times, with the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) fined £56m over an ‘unacceptable’ computer failure and Ulster Bank fined £2.75m over an IT meltdown.

For those firms who operate outside the retail banking sector, such as trading floors and investment houses similar failures would not only equate to hefty fines but also potential loss of business if trading is suspended. 

Bullet proof technology
Technologies used for trading such as telephony, turrets and voice recording systems need to be bullet proof to ensure they meet Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Dodd-Frank and other compliance obligations, particularly when the FCA have issued nearly £1.5 billion worth of fines already this year.

Questions to ask yourself

• So just how reliable is your existing telephony, turret and voice recording infrastructure, when did you last thoroughly and extensively test it to probe for weaknesses and highlight potential issues? 
• How do you ensure that all elements of your recording estate are functionally ready at the start of each day? 
• How do you ensure that you can identify when a particular Dealerboard or phone, out of the many within the organisation, is not being recorded?

Are you trying to do the impossible?
This can be a labour intensive, sometimes humanly impossible, costly and very time consuming task; just ask those firms who have recently upgraded their technology. Why? Because the chances are that they have then had to carry out the expensive, resource intensive ‘walk the floor exercise’ post implementation to check that every phone or handset continues to record and behave in the way it is supposed to. Similarly when checking your legacy systems, if just one fault or issue is found it can eat up a lot of your internal resource or support contract hours to pinpoint the exact source of the problem.

As a result, firms are increasingly turning to automated ‘Systems Monitoring’ technology to do the work for them. The latest developments in this area provide automated and proactive monitoring across multiple systems including your telephony, turret and call recording solutions to ensure they are all working together to remain fully operational, minimising the risk of any downtime.

Thanks to the development of this new niche ‘Service Assurance’ technology, firms can now demonstrate that they are proactively taking their compliance obligations seriously in the following ways;

1. Rapid identification of systems failure
Your Compliance team have a huge job balancing multiple tools, technologies and applying internal processes and policies to minimise risk. In fact recent reports suggest that risk, compliance and eDiscovery teams spend just 20% of their time managing risk with the remaining 80% spent on managing documents and reconciling information. [1]

Service Assurance technology applied to your voice recording systems can help by automating the testing and monitoring of your whole voice recording estate. ‘Start of day’ availability, quality issues and near real-time call recording failures can be identified by performing active and passive tests on an hourly, daily or weekly basis to ensure any issues with recording availability, voice quality or potential component failure are identified and acted upon rapidly.

2. Real time reporting to meet regulatory requirements
System monitoring and reporting tools provide true operational intelligence, reducing the need for manual Management Information production. Typical reports cover the output of tests that check to see;

• if call recordings have been moved onto long term storage devices after a certain period of time
• can identify if unauthorised users have been created
• or that the correct information is being taken from the switch and clearly syncs with the call recording system you have in place

The bottom line is that not only can firms demonstrate they have done everything practically possible to manage risk, they can proactively troubleshoot and flag issues before they lead to any kind of business exposure.

In addition for those organisations who operate in a dynamic environment which is ever-changing a more flexible monitoring solution has been developed to adapt with these changes without any kind of hard coding. This technology allows the firm to make any changes themselves, reducing the costs for ongoing functionality and ensuring a full end-to-end more proactive solution.

3. Redeploying valuable assets and minimising labour intensive tasks
Some firms employ large teams of people to carry out due diligence via a series of sample testing on a daily basis; daily automated systems monitoring can get you to the root cause of issues or errors quicker. Active testing tends to be a popular feature as it can automatically create calls, checking the CTI information against that call recording, the quality of the call recording and that it is being archived correctly. In some cases the staff conducting these kind of tests manually are highly skilled and valuable assets whose talents could be better employed elsewhere. For example their time could be spent reviewing the exception reports the systems monitoring provides to identify where processes can be tightened up or improved internally or to conduct ‘what if’ scenario testing. Ultimately you can redeploy your staff to focus more on risk management and less on systems testing.