The financial and banking sector has accepted remote work as a regular feature of modern business, but this shift has also created new challenges, particularly when it comes to compliance monitoring.
In such a highly regulated industry, firms must find ways to ensure that remote employees comply with new and evolving rules. Electronic communications records compliance is bound to be a top concern.
IT managers face spiralling IT costs as email storage demands are increasing at a rapid rate to monitor and archive in a way that follows FINRA, SEC, FCA and other mandates that are growing trickier by the day. The diverse range of rules and regulations include sanctions, whistleblowing and, of course, data protection and cyber security laws.
Regulatory enforcement has intensified as banks and senior management are more readily held to account by lawmakers and prosecutors, as well as shareholders. The consequences of data breaches are far-reaching with more aggressive enforcement, higher fines and regulatory costs, and growing third party liability, followed by the prospect of litigation. Regulators are increasingly focusing on business continuity, operational resilience and the management of third-party risk, following the number of major outages at banks and payment processing companies. Companies need to put into operation their response to regulation and privacy rights and not just look at cyber security.
Advantages of Email Archiving
- Compliance Readiness
Email archiving is essential for regulatory compliance. Proactively meeting compliance requirements reduces business risk and keeps regulatory authorities from breathing down their necks.
Scalable email archiving for the financial industry can help preserve email data long-term and offer rapid discovery and extraction tools to enhance audit readiness.
Also, email archive data management platforms that support an integrated compliance management workflow ease the job of seeking external expert reviews on potential breaches.
- Litigation Readiness
Growing litigations are part and parcel of operating in the financial and banking industries. According to Fullbrights’* Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey, 90% of enterprises face litigation at some point. Thus, facing litigation is almost inevitable.
Businesses can improve litigation readiness if they can find and present evidence quickly, accurately, and in a form acceptable to the courts.
Email archive solutions for the financial industry where the data preserved is immutable with an intact audited chain of custody can pull up data for electronic evidence. Accurate and fast eDiscovery with an in-built workflow to support internal legal reviews can help case management.
The correct email archiving solution for the financial industry can reduce litigation costs and protect against frivolous lawsuits.
- Automated Data Preservation
The correct email archiving solution for the financial industry automates data capture based on industry regulations, laws, and an enterprise’s data protection policy.
Besides increasing productivity, automatic archiving using journaling reduces the scope of human errors in data preservation initiatives. Since this process ingests a copy of all transacted emails in real-time, it is agnostic to what happens to the emails after delivery to the users’ mailboxes.
In other words, the financial services institute is assured of a 100% capture of all emails, thus improving compliance confidence, and delivering peace of mind.
- Advanced eDiscovery for Quick Access
Time is of the essence during audits conducted by regulatory authorities.
Modern data archiving solutions enable immediate access to the indexed data with advanced eDiscovery tools.
Powerful search tools that can scan the preserved data across any period with complex query formations find relevant results in seconds and minutes rather than hours and weeks, thus saving valuable time. Saving queries for reuse add to the productivity boost.
Responding rapidly to audit queries indicates to the auditors that your data management systems are technically advanced, organised, and in adherence with the regulatory guidelines.
- Business Continuity
Imagine that the email system is out of order or inaccessible and business communication has come to a halt. Such downtimes can cost a financial or banking enterprise dearly and worse still is the loss of reputation.
A robust email archiving solution with self-service and in-built disaster recovery can help restore communication operations in minutes. Users can view all their emails using self-service access, continue to respond to earlier emails, and even send out new ones.
These email transactions maintain the primary brand and email domain, ensuring no change in how the recipients receive or perceive the communications.
- Business Transparency
In finance and banking, transparency is the key to trust and reputation.
An enterprise can review archived data to gain insight into their business communication to help prevent financial discrepancies and vulnerabilities to fraud, detect poor trade practices, and identify improvement areas.
TrueSwift Solutions
Since 2000, TrueSwift resources have helped global finance and insurance enterprises (including Legal & General, Royal Bank of Scotland, Aberdeen Asset Management and Atradius Credit Insurance) manage their archived data. Whether storing, moving or finding archived email content, we help reduce storage and maintenance costs, and increase user transparency for compliance. As independent specialists, we are trained and accredited partners with most of the leading archive solutions, both on-premise and cloud.
- The Threat of PSTs
Cloud data migration projects across the sector have been instigated by the need to reduce management costs and corporate risk by regaining control of critical business data being held by individuals locally on their laptops, workstations, and file servers in personal archive files (PSTs). Data in PST files is essentially off the grid, not searchable by centralised IT and can easily be deleted by users. Compliance teams may not even know it exists.
To further complicate the issue, Subject Access Requests (SARs) are now being weaponised in lawsuits to improve settlements. The cost to search for PII (or any other search topic) on devices not visible to IT is prohibitive and eDiscovery often impossible within set deadlines.
The first step to taking control of PST data is to accurately locate each offending file. Once found, the data within can be managed. While this can include deletion where appropriate, more often content is securely migrated into a centralised email environment to ensure rapid and accurate eDiscovery procedures. The security risks of breaching regulations concerning PII data or SAR deadlines can be eliminated.
- Atradius Credit Insurance
As part of a global, cloud data migration project, corporate risk needed to be reduced by regaining control of critical business data being held by individuals locally on laptops, workstations, and file servers in personal archive files (PSTs), which could contain PII data. There was no definitive way of understanding the extent of PST file usage, how much and what corporate data was ‘hidden’ in the files.
PST usage was discovered and all historic email data that had to be retained was identified and securely migrated into a central repository. Rapid and accurate eDiscovery was possible as all content could be accessed by individuals and compliance teams alike. The security risks of breaching regulations concerning PII data were eliminated.
- Legacy Email Archive Platforms
Due to long standing compliance regulations, it is common for organisations in finance and banking to have existing email archiving platforms that are ageing or that are no longer fit for purpose. Many invested in on-premise archiving solutions years ago, before newer technologies(including cloud-base options), became available. Often, a strategic decision to move to newer platforms requires access to all emails contained within the original solution to be retained. In these situations, legacy data needs to be migrated to the new solution and all data processing must be secure and audited with full chain of custody. Data retention policies need to be considered and integrity maintained. Any legacy email content that cannot be migrated for any reason, must be flagged, and reported. Significant costs are saved once a legacy email solution is decommissioned.
- Legal & General Investment Management
Organisations transforming their underlying email platform by migrating from Exchange to Office 365 for example, need to migrate the contents of Public Folders to new targets. Business processes that may work well in Public Folders don’t translate easily to Shared Mailboxes, Office 365 Groups or SharePoint.
If an organisation struggles to migrate the data in them, it ends up needing to support the legacy Exchange environment, as well as the new environment, resulting in a large volume of data remaining in this state for years.
Legal & General Investment Management faced a challenge due to the ‘auto-reply’ folder rule customisations on the mailboxes. The rule could be triggered on mailbox changes with the real risk of breaking essential chain of custody for legal discovery.
“From start to finish TrueSwift provided us with a high quality service and very useful knowledge in email data management. The project requirement that we set TrueSwift was a difficult and large task that was handled efficiently and effectively”. Chris Hall - Interim Head of Technology Engineering
- Global Investment Management Organisation
To increase user transparency and reduce large overhead costs, the on-premise Exchange was migrated to Exchange Online. Enterprise Vault (EV) had previously been used to archive Exchange mailboxes and the platform contained approximately 55TB of legacy archived emails. On completion, the legacy EV environment could be safely decommissioned, saving significant maintenance and storage costs.
Notes
* Fulbright Litigation Trends Survey 2023
Report Summary