HSBC is deploying Washington-based Bantu's Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) product across its corporate investment banking and markets (CIBM) division.
The technology will be used by staff to share and manage information in real-time with colleagues, partners and clients, over the HSBCnet corporate online banking portal.
Bantu says the product's message logging capabilities, which have been integrated into HSBC's existing e-mail compliance tool from Legato Systems, enables the bank to meet compliance regulations for the SEC and NASD, as well as for European Union and Asian regulatory bodies.
Groups using the system - both internal and external - have a different interface limited to the type of interactions they are allowed to use. This prevents external users from accessing internal systems and from communicating with anyone other than permitted users.
Tony Cripps, global head of e-commerce at HSBC's CIBM unit, says: "Bantu could help us ensure compliance, provide secure real-time communications, flexible configuration and deep integration capabilities we needed, and be rolled out quickly so users could quickly realise the benefits of enhanced collaboration world-wide."