Messaging apps pose compliance risk for companies

When companies are in contact with their customers or partners today, communication takes place via many different channels. E-mail, telephone and face-to-face meetings have established themselves as traditional media over the decades. In the wake of the Corona pandemic, a number of new means of communication have now experienced an upswing. First and foremost, instant messengers such as WhatsApp, Telegram or WeChat.

Problem for business critical applications

The use of consumer messaging apps makes communication easier. But it also poses a compliance risk for companies, says LeapXpert. When employees communicate with each other or with customers via messaging apps, the content of the messages would remain invisible to a company's business-critical applications, such as compliance and audit tools or CRM systems.

Potentially important information would therefore be outside the company's boundaries and would not be available for later analysis. When business information is shared via messaging apps, it presents a new compliance challenge. This is why, according to LeapXpert, companies have reacted in the past by banning WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, iMessage & Co. for their employees - with corresponding consequences. The specialist in the field of distributed messaging cites such cases: In October 2020, Morgan Stanley dismissed two managers for compliance violations related to the use of instant messengers. In January 2020, it hit a JP Morgan employee who had exchanged information with colleagues in a WhatsApp group and thus violated regulations. The financial sector is therefore particularly affected by the problem. Various banks have stumbled across the Messenger issue in recent years, he said. Regulators would closely monitor the growth of instant messaging, but they did not explicitly warn against its use. As long as companies can comply with regulations and conversations via messaging apps are subject to the same monitoring and compliance standards as other communication methods, they will be widely accepted as a channel by regulators.

To make matters worse, he said, customers have recently been switching to apps such as Threema, Signal and Telegram following the announcement of WhatsApp's privacy changes. Signal alone saw a 4,200 percent increase in downloads in one week in January 2021. This poses even greater challenges for financial institutions and their IT departments, as they have to keep up with the changes and demand from customers and the market.

New solution launched in Switzerland

LeapXpert presents a new solution to the problem of invisible communication, the company writes. Its Federated Messaging Orchestration Platform (FMOP) makes instant messaging visible to enterprises. It allows employees to communicate via the most popular applications while ensuring that conversations are logged and compliant. Authorized employees could communicate with their external stakeholders at any time from mobile or desktop. Companies could choose who could send and receive messages, what form that information would take, and who would be authorized to send information or attachments. If an employee is not authorized to send a voice message or a specific document, the system would automatically prevent it. In addition, keywords could be defined that would prevent the sending of a message.

The FMOP integration initially supports WeChat, WhatsApp, LINE and SMS for communication between employees and customers. Signal and Telegram are in beta and will be fully integrated in April.

"Enterprises should be able to use consumer messaging apps for conversations between businesses and customers," said Avi Pardo, COO and co-founder of LeapXpert. "These conversations don't need to be invisible to compliance and governance tools."

Source: LeapXpert