Compliance Solutions - Storm IT Financial

Are you ready for the new MiFID II call recording rules, on January 3rd 2018 ?
Voice recording & Data Management under MiFID II

Recently the EU announced MiFid II (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive), the legislation that regulates firms who provide services to clients linked to ‘financial instruments’ (shares, bonds, units in collective investment schemes and derivatives), and the venues where those instruments are traded. MiFID II will take a full effect from 3 January 2018 and includes a revised MiFID and a new Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (MiFIR).

While preparing for MiFID II, taking full effect from January 3rd 2018, financial companies including alternative investment, hedge fund, wealth management, family offices and private equity firms need to address several areas of the legislation. One part of MiFid II regulation are the recording of all calls in securities trading and advice. The legislation requires comprehensive and evidence-proof recording and archiving (storage) of calls that may result in transactions regardless of the channel: phone, video call, chat or e-mail. (Note: Storm IT Financial do not offer legal advice, please consult your legal counsel for guidance on the compliance activities that are appropriate for your organisation)

MIFID requirements:

1. Document: Record all calls which will/may result in transactions.
2. Notify: Notify the customer that the conversation is being recorded.
3. Store: Store all communications for a minimum of 5 years.
4. Retrieve upon request: Reproduce quickly and easily all communications leading up to a specific transaction or in a given time period.

Who is impacted?

• While current FCA regulations are specific to those directly involved in financial trading, MiFID II will more broadly apply to all organisations providing financial advice that may lead to a trade or investment.
• IFAs, wealth managers and others currently exempt from regulation will now fall under MiFID II and therefore the requirement to record, store and periodically monitor phone calls.
• The MiFID II regulation will see the number of recorded users increase from 30,000 traders in the City of London to well over 300,000 across the UK.

MiFID II Telephone Recording & Data Management requirements:

Voice recording & Data Management under MiFID II

You must:

* Record telephone calls, mobile calls, SMS and electronic communications.
* Keep records available to clients for five years and for up to seven years for regulators.
* Tell clients you are recording their calls and give them the recordings if they ask.

This includes:

* All communications where you intend to instigate a trade or provide a service.
* Portfolio managers in all likelihood as there are no exemptions or exceptions.

Storm IT Financial solution:

Storm IT Financial provides evidence–proof recording of calls and employee/customer communications to help comply with MiFID II in terms of call recording requirements. Providing rock-solid security and high-availability architecture Storm IT Financial ensures all communications are recorded without interruption and securely stored in an encrypted format. Unique data replication functionality helps manage storage and administration costs and centrally stores call recording data from multiple locations. Call recordings can be configured to be stored for 7 years+ and can be easily retrieved upon request via a user-friendly Storm IT Financial web-interface.

Call Recording As A Service

Storm IT Financials’ call recording service ensure end users can capture communications from anywhere and any platform. Available as a true native cloud product, our call recording offers security, unlimited scalability, rapid deployment and no CAPEX. Through a SaaS (software as a service) and usage model, we enable effective recording with minimal on-going management.

Benefits of Storm IT Financial Call Recording Solution:

Security & Secure Call Recording with Encryption – A core focus of our solution is ensuring the security of sensitive content is safe. Access to recordings are limited to end users only with interactions securely stored in encrypted format as standard.

Unique Call Recording Announcement functionality – Storm IT Financials’ solutions offer a built-in recording notification to help you stay compliant with legal requirements and avoid litigation (available for both inbound and outbound call scenarios).
We play a recording announcement at the beginning of conversation to notify the clients, that the call may be recorded.

Flexible Retention policy – Administrator can easily configure retention period for call recordings. Different retention periods can be selected for different types of calls to keep storage costs down.

Secure recording share & Data replication functionality – Download is available, but we encourage our users to make use of the share tool, which protects both access and privacy. Data may be replicated from multiple locations to the central storage to manage administration and storage costs.

Data sovereignty – Storm IT Financials’ global reach provides local processing and storage for the user. We make sure no recordings are moved without user direction.

More security features for evidence-proof call recording:

Privileged Access, User Permissions & Teams – Access to data is password-protected and provided to authorised users only. Role-based access control allows to define user’s rights, such as playback, live monitoring, administration, resources access etc. Storm IT Financial offers a choice of permission and user account types and provide the flexibility for Admins to set up our solution to suit the individual structure of any business.

High-Availability architecture – Storm IT Financial implements a redundant, high availability architecture to guarantee the recording is always on, thus your business is remaining compliant even in the event of hardware failure.

Audit Log with Search & Filtering – Storm IT Financials’ activity tracking system enables full audit logs of all actions performed within the system, such as access to call recording, deletions of files, change of configuration etc. as long as permissions are configured. Every one of your recordings, no matter how old, can be found in seconds with our search function.

Cutting the Costs of Compliance – Our cloud based, MiFID II call recording and communication capture service are a fraction of the cost of legacy solutions. We can therefore provide assistance to any sized company affected by MiFID II. The lower costs make call recording accessible to any size company for the first time and make upgrades more affordable for companies already using call recording.

Comply with every Directive, MiFID II & GDPR – Cloud call recording provides the perfect assistance to MiFID II, GDPR, PCI and FCA compliance:

– Unlimited scalability fits the recording solution to every company’s individual needs
– Unlimited storage cuts the cost of following MiFID II’s 5 to 7 year storage requirement
– Smart search features efficiently browse and filter 5 years of data
– Additional features allow individuals to save only necessary calls and to protect client confidentiality

Evolution in Unified Communications – Storm IT Financial ticks all the traditional boxes when it comes to cloud call recording and more. With unlimited scalability, no upfront costs and innovative add-on modules such as Playback and Intelligence, our solution enables you to provide a new and exciting service to your business and to your employees.

Cloud Call Recording

With Storm IT Financials’ cloud call recording, Alternative Investment, Hedge Fund, Asset Manager, Wealth Manager, Family Office & Private Equity Firms can adapt a whole new level of compliance solution to their businesses and employee end-users that grows as they grow and helps deal with the technology & data management of regulatory & compliance burdens now required by the FCA, MiFID II & GDPR.

MiFID II requirements which are due by January 3rd 2018, around IT, data, transparency, reporting, and record keeping are putting enormous pressure on European buy side and alternative investment firms and are consuming considerable internal resources. The volume and variety of data to be processed and stored, the complexity of the analytical processes, and the urgency of the reporting requirements necessitate a step change in technology, something that Storm IT Financial has knowledge, experience, expertise and solutions to help your firm technologically comply and make your business run smoothly.

For more information on how we can help your Alternative Investment, Hedge Fund, Asset Manager, Wealth Manager, Family Office & Private Equity Firm be compliant with MiFID II & GDPR, implementing telecom & mobile recording solutions, data collection and storage services, cloud migration & backup advice & IT Services, please call  Storm IT Financial
+44 (0) 208 449 0056.