How to Weave Compliance into Remote Trading

IPC and Verint team up to help businesses enable seamless financial trading workflows and manage compliance risk during times of uncertainty

These are disruptive times – but life and business must go on. The corresponding effects of the COVID-19 crisis have brought unprecedented challenges for global business and the financial markets, not least of which is the need for market participants to continue to operate against a backdrop of lockdowns and business restrictions.

The most recent decision by the New York Stock Exchange to temporarily close its trading floors and fully move to electronic trading is emblematic not only of global financial centres but also the wider business environment, where many of the fundamental challenges caused by the coronavirus outbreak are similar.

Organizations are being hit with increased market uncertainty, as various physical locations are entering lockdown status, and their staff are increasingly forced to perform their duties from either alternative trading locations or home.

Financial firms need to adapt fast to this new reality and are embracing remote work options more than ever before as part of their business continuity efforts. Buy-side firms and sell-side firms alike are now required to extend trader connectivity beyond financial dealing rooms and front-line offices to remote locations.
However, implementing such a transition in a controllable and ordered manner poses many challenges. And prominent among those is the need to continue to meet the highest security and compliance standards regulating the capital markets.

Solving the Business Continuity Conundrum

Despite various regulators – such as the ESMA, CFTC and the UK’s FCA – moving to relax some of the rules around the recording of voice and electronic communications, abandoning these standards completely – even in the current crisis – could prove to be counterproductive.

First of all, these are temporary measures intended to ease the stress on businesses that are transitioning to a remote-based model. Organizations need to make sure their compliance infrastructure is ready to cope with the changed status quo but also be prepared for the time when business processes get back to the ‘new’ normal.

On the other hand, reputations rely as much on popular perceptions as they do on documented evidence. And successful businesses are built – among other things – on reputation. Would you want your business to be remembered for failing to demonstrate accepted norms of behaviour during a crisis? The health of your business and reputation after the crisis is over should be just as much a priority as your survival through it. So your firm’s compliance posture should not be cast aside, no matter how unusual the times we find ourselves in.

During uncertain times, those that are equipped with a scalable and resilient trading communications and networking environment that is integrated with the trading ecosystem can enable their traders and other regulated staff to maintain standard workflows and securely interact with clients and counterparties. At the same time, with many organizations relocating their staff and scaling up their home-based operations to maintain uninterrupted trading activities, this can present its own set of challenges in terms of continuing to meet regulatory obligations and reducing business risk.

Depending on what communications platforms your business deployed or where your traders and support staff perform their daily work, traditional compliance recording and surveillance technology solutions may struggle to keep up with the changing demand to capture and monitor trade-related calls across a mix of environments and remote locations.

When we factor in the use of virtual trader voice clients, soft phone endpoints, unified communications tools, mobile devices and enterprise messaging apps, compliance and operational complexities arise that need to be addressed in the short term.

A Partnership for Compliant Trading Communications

When IPC and Verint first teamed up in 2012, our partnership was founded on a clear ethos of helping the financial markets stay connected in a secure, compliant way. This imperative couldn’t be more relevant today.
As a response to the changing market dynamics, IPC and Verint are forging even deeper collaboration to empower financial firms with compliant and secure trading communications and enable robust, highly available trading workflows in today’s digital era.

Verint Financial Compliance, a transformative financial compliance technology framework, has been designated as one of the strategic trader voice capture, records retention and data governance solutions for Unigy, IPC’s flagship trading communications platform. This collaboration offers banks, investment firms, asset managers, and other financial institutions compliant trading connectivity across the enterprise.

As we combine IPC’s industry-leading secure communications and networking solutions for the capital markets with Verint’s broad capabilities and expertise in financial compliance technology, we sharpen our focus on supporting financial services firms seeking to deal with increasing regulatory scrutiny. IPC and Verint have been helping the industry tackle voice compliance challenges and manage risk across the trading lifecycle.

Openness and Flexibility to Support Remote Operations

IPC’s technology infrastructure powers a multi-modal platform and unparalleled community that together provide a comprehensive solution for end-to-end connectivity, facilitating secure information flow to financial customers globally. IPC’s commercial and technical flexibility allows the customer many options to connect and consume services, whether on premise or via an IPC private or hybrid cloud delivery model.

IPC’s diverse global ecosystem enables a unique, unified industry solution for interconnecting counterparties and empowering direct end-user accessibility. Verint’s integrated, easily scalable compliance capture, optimized data model for trader voice recording, robust data governance, and advanced trading metadata ingestion – augmented by the advantages of cloud-based archiving and deployment models – provides significant benefits for customers.

Firms can also benefit from easy access to and retrieval of the recorded data, third-party integrations, resiliency options, and a set of sophisticated features for IT and Compliance teams globally.

As businesses increasingly move their focus to remote operations, IPC and Verint can provide resilient, fault-tolerant solutions and global support to help ensure frictionless trading processes while remaining within the boundaries of regulatory compliance. Financial organizations can continue to operate without interruption by using IPC’s soft turret clients that offer intuitive user interfaces and rich functionalities right on the trader’s desktop. This is augmented by Verint’s reliable compliance recording technology that brings rapid deployment, simplified architecture, and fluid integration with other collaboration environments.All of this can be remotely implemented, helping businesses scale their deployments to meet the changing business environment. Both our companies are dedicated to supporting customers’ business continuity plans and, under the current circumstances, we aim to do everything to support the industry and provide guidance, consultation and advice wherever possible.

As we enter this new, exciting chapter in our collaboration, our teams endeavour to enable seamless remote workflows and global operations for market participants, while supporting their journey to meet heightened regulatory requirements amid today’s market volatility.