The FCA has spoken: UK bankers must record all of their conversations while working from home. The authority had previously granted an exemption from record keeping requirements when the UK received the first stay at home orders in March 2020.

In guidance last updated on January 12th 2021 at the time of writing, the FCA stated:

“At the start of the pandemic, if your firm moved to an alternative site or a working from home arrangement, we asked you to consider the broader control environment in view of the new circumstances.

Given the extensive duration of these arrangements, we now expect you to record all relevant communications (including voice calls) when working outside the office.

You should continue to take all steps to prevent market abuse risks. This could include enhanced monitoring, or retrospective reviews. We will continue to monitor for market abuse and, if necessary, take action.”FCA Coronavirus (Covid-19): Information for firms

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a third national lockdown on January 4th 2021, following a rapid rise in COVID-19 infections due to a more transmissible new variant of the virus. The order stated that people could only go to work if they could not reasonably do so from home.

While the FCA made allowances for scenarios where calls could not be recorded in previous lockdowns, the same standards of surveillance now apply to bankers working from home as in offices.

How can banks stay compliant?

With home-workers utilising mobile devices and a range of communications platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex, financial institutions face the challenge of ensuring that conversations taking place across every phone, PC or tablet are in compliance with monitoring requirements. Call recording is no longer application-specific and needs to be unified.

By capturing calls directly from the network with a Unified Call Recording (UCR) solution, firms can capture conversations from mobile devices across wireless and IP connections. Shifting to a cloud solution frees financial institutions from the restrictions of application-specific and infrastructure-based call recording normally confined to call centre environments. UCR offers a cloud-native solution that records directly from the network to complement remote working.

How UCR works

UCR is the core infrastructure for any company that wants to unify conversational data across their whole business.

Where legacy call recording only captured calls from on-premise systems and held them in local storage, UCR is not limited to one office or application. Today, businesses communicate across multiple devices and platforms, and UCR is designed precisely to work alongside a dispersed workforce. Whether a business communicates via mobile devices or platforms such as Microsoft Teams, UCR sits within the network to capture their conversations and store them securely in the cloud for immediate access and management.

For more information on how Dubber’s Unified Call Recording can help with FCA call recording requirements, get in touch with a member of the team today.