Trends With: Donald McElligott
What trends do you see within your line of business?
The finance services industry operates under a stringent set of regulatory requirements. In order to provide a fair and safe market, the regulators need accurate and complete business recordkeeping, and proof of effective risk detection. The incredible growth of electronic messaging platforms and mobile social media apps have made this extremely difficult.
As new avenues of communication channels are introduced, it becomes increasingly difficult for regulated firms to maintain full oversight and compliance of their business communications. Financial institutions must now implement intelligent pieces of data connectors to ensure no message goes unrecorded and archived. This trend also drives a shift towards AI-enabled tools that can sift through vast amounts of comms data. Firms are beginning to prioritize solutions that can adapt to regulatory changes with ease and efficiency.
From your perspective, what are the greatest challenges right now?
The biggest challenge that FinTech firms face right now is keeping pace with this rapidly expanding messaging environment. Financial firms are always looking for solutions to balance the need to reach out to customers with the requirements to capture and supervise their communications. Younger generations are growing up with different technology for communications and business. Making things more complicated, each different geographic region seems to pick a different platform.
Financial firms must reach that audience, but they can’t ignore the requirements to capture and supervise all of it. Some technical solutions provide quick and dirty solutions to scrape the data for capture. It’s a fast fix, but very often breaks and can be incomplete. They often violate the terms of use for the very technology they are capturing. The best approach is for vendors in the space to form solid technology partnerships across the platforms. It may not be the fastest solution, but it provides reliable, secure, and complete data capture.
And, opportunities?
Global Relay is fortunate that we remain a stable, employee owned, and independent company with the resources to provide a complete solution. We continue to invest in the connectors to capture all the major communication platforms. We host our record-keeping archives in our own, private cloud that can easily scale to support the largest financial firms. We’ve also been able to pioneer a new approach to use Large Language Models to revolutionise the approach to risk detection and surveillance.