Reducing the Compliance Risk | Microsoft Teams Surveillance

1. SHIELD MICROSOFT TEAMS SURVEILLANCE: ANOTHER COMPLIANCE HEADACHE OR A SILVER-LINING ? For compliance officers, an adjustment to a ‘new compliance normal’ was required. New communications channels and a new remote work environment made it difficult, especially for the surveillance function. But perhaps, if you’re a Compliance Officer in financial services, you did find some respite in the fact that Microsoft® Teams surveillance was an available option so that your colleagues could communicate securely to keep the business and economy churning forward. Why the interest now? The adoption of eComms and e-Collaboration tools has been on the rise over the past couple of years. Not only in financial services, but broadly across all industries. I asked Magdalena Glowacka, a business solutions consultant at FIS Global if she thought that the rapid adoption of e-Collab tools like Microsoft Teams was a temporary artifact from the pandemic She didn’t think so, stating that “The rapid increase of Microsoft Teams as a preferred means of business communications has become a key marker of this trend towards e-collaboration.” These work solutions offer tremendous convenience, cross- platform integration and have the ability to manage files and search across multi-media, including unstructured data like videos and compressed (zipped) data. With the immediacy of COVID-19, small and large financial firms, and every size in between, shifted overnight to working from home – beyond the reach of most firms’ regulatory compliance efforts. Will we revert back to our old ways? All signs are pointing to a “new compliance normal” given the sustained (and unwelcome) persistence of the novel coronavirus. Behaviors repeated often enough and for long enough become habits and rituals which have been proven extremely difficult to break. Working with e-Collab and eComms tools so proficiently over the past few months of global lockdowns, self-isolation and social distancing have already ingrained them into our daily operations. Reducing the risk At the onset of COVID-19, particularly in mid-March when the world almost simultaneously went dark – and went home – regulatory authorities like the SEC and numerous others offered conditional regulatory relief. Back then, most governments divided their efforts into two prongs: public safety and health for their people and preventing financial collapse. Since that time, public and financial health has remained in the spotlight for nearly every country around the globe. Source: https://www.shieldfc.com