5 Major Benefits Of Using A Multi-Client Supervision Platform For Monitoring Communications
1st May 2023 by Samuel Rossiter
If you work for a compliance oversight business such as a Compliance Consultancy, Regulatory Host or Outsourced CCO, then this blog is for you.
Do you currently offer communications supervision or compliance monitoring to your client network? Or, considering that the regulatory requirement for communications surveillance for regulated financial firms is only getting more important, have you recently considered offering this service?
Offering communications supervision as a service to a large client network—what are the problems?
You’ll need to think about using the right technology to carry out a multi-client supervision service, because without it, there’s a lot of time, effort and manual work that goes into supervising each client’s communications. Your monitoring team might be using dozens of different systems and logins just to review a handful of communications, every single day. Multiply that manual work and effort by dozens or hundreds of clients, however many you have, and you can start to see how providing this service is quite an undertaking.
You might not think that’s a problem, if your supervision model consists of charging out your consultants’ time then charging your clients a significant fee higher than this, so whatever your team get done, they get done… right?
Unfortunately, that type of thinking doesn’t really cut it anymore. Regulators across the world now expect communications to be monitored thoroughly, and your compliance oversight business needs to provide total oversight across a firm’s many communication channels to manage risk and detect financial crime. Random sampling and limited eDiscovery does not even touch regulators’ expectations anymore—nor is this kind of service a market-leading offering. It’s also costly in consultant time management, and conducting this kind of work doesn’t make your team feel like they are using their compliance skills to their fullest extent.
There’s clearly a worldwide need to offer great communications surveillance services… but how do you deliver this service effectively, cost efficiently and in a way that prioritises compliance?
We’re here to introduce you to the concept of a multi-client supervision platform, and explain how the use of this technology can be a gamechanger for you and your team. It’ll help you offer communications supervision at scale effectively, increase your efficiency and give you the potential to superscale your business.
What is a multi-client communications supervision platform?
A multi-client communications supervision platform allows you to supervise the communications of hundreds of clients, Appointed Representatives, businesses or international offices using a unified, cloud-based software platform.
So why is this so revolutionary? Typically, conducting communications supervision as a service for many clients involves the use of a lot of unconnected systems and disjointed processes. Your clients might have their own communications supervision system that they use, which they give your compliance team access to. So, to supervise 100 clients, you might use at least 100 different systems to monitor their communications and conduct random sampling in each system, searching through random communications to try and find bad conduct and malicious activity.
Or, your team might have to go on-site to an office, sit at employees’ desktops and sift through many emails and phone calls to try and find risky activity like a needle in a haystack. All of this for a single client. Magnify that by a hundred clients, and you can see how much time and money this method wastes.
But using a multi-client supervision platform, to supervise 100 clients, you only need to use one system… bring on Fingerprint.
The Fingerprint platform ingests the communication channels (Teams, email, ICE, Bloomberg Chat, etc.) of your entire client network and stores it all in a secure database, with data for each client segregated. Then, the platform automatically analyses this data, detects the risks within it via lexicons and Natural Language Processing, and ranks these risky items by urgency for your monitoring team to review. With only one login, your team can supervise your entire client network—with access to all risk-ranked items for review, and in-platform investigation workflows and reporting tools to investigate activity for compliance, very effectively.
You can learn more about how Fingerprint works here.
So, what are the benefits of using a multi-client supervision platform?
1. Unified oversight over your entire client network in one place
The first major benefit of having a multi-client supervision system is having unified oversight over your entire client network’s communications in one place.
With only one login, your compliance team can access everything they need to conduct communications supervision for your client network. And permissions can also be adjusted according to each team member, so they can only see what they need for their specific clients.
If your current team need access to 100 different systems for 100 different clients, they’ll also waste valuable time learning how to use these systems, logging in and out of these different systems for different clients, and generating reports in another different system to pass onto management and evidence they’ve hit their KPIs.
But using a multi-client supervision platform means all of this wasted time using different systems and doing extra administrative work is gone. You’ll only need one system for unified oversight over all of your clients for simple and effective communications supervision.
2. Onboard new clients in minutes and superscale your business
Having a multi-client supervision system which is cloud-based with open API is invaluable. You can onboard new clients to the system in minutes and offer communications supervision at scale to hundreds of clients seamlessly, supporting your business to superscale.
Adding new clients to a multi-client supervision system is a simple ‘switch on’ process. Your new client will simply need to give the system access to their communication channels (email, Teams, Zoom, etc.), and the multi-client system will ingest these channels in minutes. Your monitoring team can then set up lexicons and search terms that are unique to each of your clients, and our platform will ensure that all client data is stored securely and segregated.
If it currently takes a at least a month for your team to add a new client to your network and learn how to use their supervision system, imagine how much your business can grow if that process is whittled down to five minutes.
3. Improve your efficiency with tech and save time
When everything is brought into a single system, everything becomes simpler and more efficient.
Because the Fingerprint multi-client platform places identified risk items into a prioritised review list, your team’s investigation time is made more efficient and far more effective. They will only review relevant and risky communications without having to find it themselves in an endless ocean of data. Long gone are the days of random, inefficient sampling.
4. Compliance comes first with a policy-driven system
The Fingerprint platform is policy-driven—which means that the entire way this multi-client system investigates activity is driven by your own or your client’s communication supervision policy.
The platform searches for terms and lexicons which your team sets according to the compliance policy. This policy drives all of the review, investigation, reporting and audit workflows that the platform provides. If your client’s policy specifies that reports must be generated on a monthly basis, then the platform will generate them monthly. If your client’s policy specifies quarterly reports instead, then the platform will generate them quarterly.
So you don’t need to worry about compromising on compliance and missing regulatory requirements for your clients, even as you increase efficiency and save time. Using the multi-client Fingerprint platform, you can provide a quality supervision service that keeps your clients engaged.
5. Showcase your team’s monitoring work to your clients using meaningful KPIs
Because a multi-client platform includes everything you need to supervise communications for compliance, this means that all of the actions and investigations that your team undertake is recorded by the system. This feature really shines when you sell your consultants’ time and need to showcase their hard work to your clients.
Using the system means that your compliance monitoring team’s activity can be measured against meaningful KPIs. So, for example, without the use of a multi-client system, your team might be set a KPI of reviewing 300 random emails every month as per your client’s supervision policy. But, using a multi-client and automated platform like Fingerprint which risk ranks all activity, your team can be set a KPI of reviewing 300 risk-ranked items every month. Using the system guarantees that they’ll be reviewing risky and meaningful activity instead of random emails.
Fingerprint will track the activity of your team against these KPIs, and reports are easily generated within the system to show your clients and the regulators just how well the team are performing.
It’s a very user-friendly system that enables your team to do their job well, puts compliance first and supports your business to deliver a market-leading supervision service to your clients.
We hope you enjoyed our blog and learned more about how a multi-client supervision platform like Fingerprint can help your compliance oversight business.
You can learn more about the platform here, and if you’re interested in chatting to us or if you’d like a demo of the product, then please get in touch!
