Today's unified comms and collaboration tools are responsible for many banking transactions; over the phone renewals, online contracts, email confirmation receipts, general phone and internet banking to name a few. As such unified communications has come under scrutiny for its ability to enable banks to not only be compliant but also to support security concerns.
Financial institutions are heavily regulated and they must be compliant to laws to remain insured. Unified comms systems used by banks should be enabled to undertake compliance tasks. Compliance enablement can come in many forms for example, call recording assurance (CRA). CRA ensures calls that must be recorded by law are both recorded correctly and stored safely. Being featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal because calls required to be recorded for regulatory compliance were misplaced must be mitigated against.
When we compare the U.S. to other parts of the world from a regulatory standpoint, there are many similarities. There's consistency in the way institutions are required to show revenue, confirm trades, and clear the trade desk of true ups at the end of the day. On the other hand, areas like India, Brazil, and China are very difficult to do business in due to the difficult regulatory environment. You may see greater adoption of next-generation applications within banking and finance in regions like Europe and the US before some of the other major growth countries.
Ongoing security concerns are also an ever-changing situation. For example, current threats such as Wikileaks and what happened recently with the US presidential environment. If an institution compromises its customers' data, they are finished. Consequentially, expenditure on security spending is increasing and much of the increase is in compliance, not IT. Over the last three years, almost 20% of IT budgets have moved out of the line of business. Gartner says this number may increase to 50% by 2021.
When an institution is agile, they aren't going to IT to perform a big review of a new business application or feature. When it comes to line of business, it just makes more sense to make the investment after seeing the ROI. The institution will not even go through IT anymore, so that's one of the major changes we're seeing. At the same time, many of the applications that institutions are spending on are related to increased security.
Along with the need for a secure and compliant environment, new unified comms provide increased revenue by enhancing personal contact with clients. Even though the backend is all about security, the environment is inherently better suited for compliance and collaboration. These trends in banking can drastically improve client retention.