FSA Compliance
The UK’s FSA now requires many financial services firms to record calls.
The FSA’s paper confirming the rules changes says:
“Firms will be required to record telephone lines used for voice conversations that involve the receipt of client orders and the negotiating, agreeing and arranging of transactions across the equity, bond and financial commodity and derivatives markets…”
How do I know if my business is required to record calls?
Firstly, we suggest you read the FSA’s Conduct of Business Sourcebook (COBS). In it, section 11.8.1R says that telephone recording requirements apply to a “firm..which carries out any of the following activities:
(1) receiving client orders;
(2) executing client orders;
(3) arranging for client orders to be executed;
(4) carrying out transactions on behalf of the firm, or another person in the firm’s group, and which are part of the firm’s trading activities or the trading activities of another person in the firm’s group;
(5) executing orders that result from decisions by the firm to deal on behalf of its client;”
In addition, the July 2010 publication Mortgage Market Review: Arrears and Approved persons - Including feedback to CP10/2 contains more information about FSA recording requirements.
(Please note that terms in italics have specific legal meanings.)
Veritape meets all the FSA’s requirements for call recording.
Whilst the FSA doesn’t “approve” or “authorise” call recording systems, and as such no call recording system can be labelled as being “FSA compliant”, as you would expect, Veritape CallGuard does meet all the FSA’s requirements. Our scope includes call retrieval, storage, logs, audit trails and security.
The FSA won’t accept call recordings which have been tampered with or obviously edited. Therefore, if you are planning on implementing a call recording system such as Verint or Nice, which offer a ‘pausing’ solution, you may not be FSA compliant. Veritape CallGuard uses DTMF technology - it doesn’t touch the call recording at all - the recorder continues to run with no changes. However, card data is automatically removed. The remaining parts of the conversation continue to be recorded, with no interruption.
Is your business regulated by the FSA and needing to be PCI DSS compliant?
At first glance, the FSA guidelines and the PCI DSS guidelines may appear to conflict with each other. However, Veritape can help here because our systems meet all of the FSA’s call recording requirements and is PCI DSS compliant.
The FSA’s July 2010 publication Mortgage Market Review: Arrears and Approved persons - Including feedback to CP10/2 explains that the FSA requirements and the PCI DSS requirements are compatible, providing you use a system to remove card data prior to recording the call. This is exactly what Veritape CallGuard does.
Contact us and ask for our whitepaper on FSA and PCI DSS call recording. We’ll be happy to send it to you, and then talk you through how each set of specific requirements can be serviced by Veritape.
