This blog explains why the Banking and Financial Services sectors have been key for TrueSwift since we established in 2010.
Our archiving services help these organisations reduce cost of email storage and at the same time enabling swifter discovery of their email data, enabling them to stay compliant. We also migrate email data from one archiving platform to another. When performing a migration the Chain of Custody is important for any business, but especially so for the regulated financial sector. Our archiving and migration services allow for increased efficiency, security and productivity for our clients.
The compliance burden for financial institutions has increased significantly over the past decade. Regulatory enforcement has intensified as banks and senior management are more readily held to account by lawmakers and prosecutors, as well as shareholders. At the same time, they are subject to a growing body of rules and regulations in a diverse range of areas, including sanctions, whistle-blowing and, of course, data protection and cyber security laws.
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 operationalise their response to regulation and privacy rights and not just look at cyber security.
Advantages of Email Archiving
◊ Compliance readiness
The most significant advantage of email archiving for enterprises in the financial and banking industries is helping them comply with regulations like PRA and FCA in the UK, EBA and MiFID II in Europe, FDIA, FDIC, FRS, OCC, SEC, FINRA and CFTC in the US, RBI, SEBI, and IRDAI in India, which require long-term data preservation.
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, data management platforms that support an integrated compliance management workflow ease the job of seeking external expert reviews on potential breaches. There are many different on-premise or cloud archiving solutions that can archive this.
◊ 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 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 law suits.
◊ Automated Data preservation
The correct email archiving service for the financial industry automates data capture based on industry regulations, laws and an enterprise’s data protection policies.
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. New-age email archiving solutions for the financial industry also support boolean query constructs to help narrow search results to the exact requirement.
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 – adds brownie points for your brand image.
◊ 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. Each year, IT downtime costs enterprises a staggering revenue loss of $26.5 billion. 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 financial 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.