Etrali Trading Solutions and EE Develop New Mobile Voice Recording Offering

Technology behind mobile recording has progressed fantastically over the past few years. Clunky three-way lines and virtual operator are still admittedly compliant, but come with seconds of delay that are inherently inconvenient, and increasingly intolerable. Expectations have changed, and new solutions like Etrali Trading Solutions and UK's biggest mobile service provider EE's jointly developed mobile voice recording offering is prepped to fill the void.

"Mobile Voice Recording works with any handset and, because it is embedded within the EE network, it automatically records all calls without the user having to do anything," explains the press release. "Users don’t need to open apps to access the service or remember to dial prefix numbers before making calls, reducing overall call costs."

The 'In the City' strategy targets city-based financial service firms in the UK, integrated to comply with the FCA mobile trading regulations.

Robert Powell, global head of compliance at Etrali Trading Solutions explains in a phone interview that the process is almost indistinguishable from the normal mobile call experience. "Once the sim card is enabled for recording, when the phone call is made the intelligent device will route the call to a Etrali recording platform." Etrali will begin to take the record and turn it back to EE for call completion.

Many banks are already invested in recording and capture technology, so Etrali can stream the call live down to them. "In this case we don't store any of that data, we record until it's finished streaming, and then we remove the encrypted recording from our services… Most tier 1s do that because they've already invested millions in recording infrastructure." Another option is private cloud storage, through which a compliance office can log in with two factor authentication to access. This is typical of more reactive companies.

The join project began in November of 2011 and Powell says it has taken a huge effort from both Etrai and EE to make it the "Rolls Royce of premium solutions in the market." The greatest technology challenge was the interconnect between their systems and building a fail-safe.

Looking Ahead

The most important driver of this development is the adoption of new regulations. While the CFTC only cares about swaps today, in time it will cover the entire financial arena, predicts Powell. "The SEC is keen to work towards recording certain conversations for a number of years now because quite often an investigation will come to an end point when the people involved stop putting things in writing and get on a call… Quite often there is a level of frustration when the SEC would like to have recorded mobile phone calls."

He adds the next real challenge will be moving customers (the financial institutions who own the devices) onto EE sim cards and away from legacy applications.

Etrali has global platforms and is currently testing interest in mobile recording solutions in the US with four tier-1 financial institutions using virtualized network carriers. Becca Lipman is Senior Editor for Wall Street & Technology. She writes in-depth news articles with a focus on big data and compliance in the capital markets. She regularly meets with information technology leaders and innovators and writes about cloud computing, datacenters, ... View Full Bio