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Mobile voice recording – addressing financial services record keeping challenges

By Viv Crone, CTO at Spescom Limited

A well-publicised incident that happened last year involving a prominent member of the South African legal system crashing into a businessman’s wall and subsequent recordings by cell phone of what transpired at the scene raised a number of questions around privacy and the admissibility of such evidence in legal disputes.

However, the reality is recordings made on a personal communication device can provide a legally acceptable record of events, and the technology that makes these recordings irrefutable is available to both South African industries and general consumers.  New technology is now available that allows businesses to keep a unified record of their mobile recordings alongside fixed-line recordings all on a single, unified platform.

Any conversation you have on a telephone, whether a standard landline or mobile device, can be recorded and, subject to applicable legal principals and legislation, can be admitted as evidence in legal proceedings.

Mobile voice recording is even more relevant in the financial services and intermediary industry, where the recording of conversations has become compulsory due South African government acts such as RICA (Regulation of interception of communications and provisioning of communication-related information Act), FICA (Financial Intelligence Centre Act) and FAIS (Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act).

For example, in the case of the FAIS, financial service providers such as intermediaries have to:

• Record verbal and written communication related to a financial service rendered;
• Maintain records regarding cancellations, complaints and compliance (or non-compliance) for five years; and
• Store and secure these records for five years after the termination of the product or after the financial service has been rendered.

However, this can become quite a challenge as often intermediaries have to accurately keep a record of conversations while staying mobile at the same time. Adding to these qualms is the secure and reliable storage of the information, once recorded, which should also allow for easy access to records when the need arises.

With the proliferation of mobile technology, we have seen the emergence of resultant challenges. The way we transact and do business today is completely removed from an era where a notepad and pen was the only method of recordkeeping.

And whilst voice recording is a well-known practice in call centres and financial institutions, forming part of their performance management, quality assurance and risk management endeavours, mobility does add a layer of complexity.

Putting a handset to ‘speaker’ and then physically recording the conversation to tape recorder just doesn’t cut it.  It is an archaic and unreliable method as the conversation quality is inferior and as a result, the recordkeeping can also be comprised.  Furthermore, it is important to have peace of mind that your conversation is recorded, irrespective whether you’re in the car or quickly running out of a meeting to take the call.

Fortunately, technology advances now enable financial service providers such intermediaries to record any conversation or telephonic interaction to their mobile devices that in turn ensures accurate record keeping as dictated by legislation. 

Today, there are mobile applications available that record all conversations, authenticates and ‘tamper-proofs’ them with an electronic signature. Recorded mobile conversations are then safely stored on a central server within the enterprise. These recordings can then be seamlessly accessed along with fixed line calls recorded by the business, on a single, unified platform. This information can then be retrieved, played, exported and e-mailed.

Looking more closely at the technology, the authentication of recordings is done by ‘signing’ the recording file with a unique signature based on various parameters of the data captured.

Date and time stamps are included, with the caller line ID and serial number of the phone also being recorded as a matter of course. In addition, speaker verification, which is in essence biometrics-based voice analysis, can identify a speaker as clearly as a fingerprint or iris scan through comparison of the recording with a sample of that person’s voice.

Financial service providers do have stringent record keeping procedures to abide to; however, with the proliferation of mobile recording applications, these steps can be met with relative ease.

Find out more from our website at www.removault.co.za

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