Compliance is a notoriously time-consuming responsibility, a discipline that relies on precision and meticulous oversight. This reputation has been around for some time, even when regulatory compliance was mainly concerned with email and printed materials as opposed to today’s steady torrent of digital corporate output.
We have gradually seen compliance become more of an industry unto itself as opposed to another ‘hat’ for somebody to wear in an organization - something which has been particularly prevalent in smaller businesses. In recent years, the ‘WhatsApp fines’ alone have totaled billions in fines for noncompliance from the SEC and CFTC, adding significant pressure and scrutiny across corporations.
We have now reached a point where the explosion of communications platforms, regulations and supervisory requirements have made it increasingly challenging to detect noncompliant behavior. Something has to give for compliance teams to effectively manage their snowballing workload, as well as spiraling costs from using multiple solutions.
Below we’ll share 5 tips for speeding up your compliance workflow!
1. Threading and Native Capture
One of the biggest issues around traditional communications archiving is the lack of context associated with captured messages. From WhatsApp to Slack, trying to piece together how employees communicate is difficult without the right tools. Right now, the industry standard is to convert all messages to email threads, resulting in a disjointed reviewer experience that derails the momentum of a conversation. It's a slow, fragmented process that could also allow non-compliant behaviors to go undetected.
Some modern compliance vendors have begun to recognize this inefficiency, presenting communications in the original channel’s native format with all interactions (comments, reactions, attachments) displayed inline to tell the whole story. It's a valuable feature that presents conversations in a linear manner and allows users to review communications logically.
2. Artificial Intelligence
While very much the tech du jour, there is a reason AI has been adopted across such a significant proportion of global industry; it can facilitate enormous improvements in data processing and analysis. The volume of communications that compliance teams must review has increased 10-15x over the past 10-15 years, so the ability to ‘learn’ noncompliant behavior to then be flagged to the compliance officer’s attention is clearly of interest.
However, while AI and machine learning are important, the industry is still grappling with how to properly implement them for compliance purposes. Just as regulators themselves are deliberating over how chatbot-generated content affects existing regulatory frameworks, compliance vendors are ensuring they have all the necessary data to make the transformational steps required.
Compliance is a precise science, so shooting for a moving target is relatively futile.
3. Unification
The number of digital channels ingrained into both corporate and everyday life is already substantial, and ever-expanding. Compliance has begun to catch up, with its eye-catching penalties over the use of ‘off-channel’ communications like WhatsApp, SMS and iMessage since 2021. As a result, there is an expanding catalog of platforms which must be monitored and reviewed daily.
Not all vendors can capture every platform, and so many firms find themselves working with a patchwork of different solutions to ensure there are no areas of compliance vulnerability. This is inefficient - context switching always is - especially when you consider the different functionalities across different platforms.
Where possible, regulated firms should identify a vendor that is capable of storing all their disparate data behind a single pane of glass.
4. Website Changes
Following the introduction of the SEC’s Marketing Rule in 2022 and the FCA Consumer Duty in 2023, it has become clear that consumer protection in digital spaces is a priority for regulators. Websites are a company’s primary marketplace, and so archaic statutes were updated to reflect the modern consumer experience. Firms must evidence fundamental changes to a website that can affect the consumer, and so the ability to quickly detect those changes allows the compliance team to be laser focused on the content itself.
This kind of feature is difficult to get right, and could end up creating more work if executed poorly. With a variety of different options on the market, from text diffs to visual overlays and more, it’s worth investigating and finding a solution that works best for your team.
5. Transcription
Business habits in a post-pandemic world are an entirely different proposition. In a nutshell, far more meetings occur online (returning to the office did not reduce the frequency of this). Noncompliance is just as prevalent in oral communications as it is in written, and so amid the growing regulatory focus on electronic communications supervision, the next step has long been anticipated to be heightened scrutiny around video calls.
Transcription is therefore a vital feature, allowing compliance teams to scan through transcribed content quickly after the event has taken place. To take the enhancement one step further, the ability to click through to flagged content in the transcription (noncompliant terms, for example , triggered by lexicon policies) allows huge efficiencies and higher success rate after long meetings, when users just want to review potentially noncompliant terms rather than analysing the entire transcription.
Get to the Point
These five tips are largely interlinked, and it is unsurprising that each focuses on organizing data in a way that brings pertinent information to the surface. It’s vital that compliance teams are able to cut through the vast swathes of communications which they’re increasingly being held accountable for.
In 2025, each of the above features should be implemented or assessed by your vendor as compliance demands continue to escalate. The industry is replete with established providers stuck with antiquated systems that lack the required agility to handle evolving demands.
When procuring or upgrading your compliance vendor, it’s important to ask the correct questions and ensure your team will be ably supported with agile technology that helps them locate needles within ever-multiplying haystacks.
How MirrorWeb Can Help
Our communications supervision platform, MirrorWeb Insight, was built to lighten the load for compliance personnel and to streamline the processes critical to full regulatory oversight. We’ve used customer-driven innovation to rethink every aspect of the compliance experience from reviews to reporting, and are constantly evolving alongside customer behavior and industry requirements. Book a demo for a closer look!
