Failure: never an option for the compliance team

Every call recording manager’s nightmare scenario

The problem: the call should have been recorded automatically. The policy says it was. The system dashboard suggested it was. But the file cannot be found… and she’s tried all the retrieval methods that the vendor documentation says should work like a dream.

So begins the attempt to catch up and resolve the issue by checking logs, retracing workflows, contacting IT, searching backups, reviewing retention policies, and trying to answer the question every compliance professional fears most: What really happened here—and can we prove it?

In regulated industries – which now include not just financial services, but also areas like healthcare – compliance failure never advertises itself in the moment; there’s no handy alarm bell when a recording silently fails or a message slips outside policy.

However, the real issue can be the gaps in records that the team detects during audits, investigations, disputes, or legal proceedings. As we have seen, even the biggest companies can suffer call recording issues.

In 2021, the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fined JPMorgan a combined $200 million after finding employees, including senior staff, were conducting business through personal devices and unapproved channels such as WhatsApp and text messaging, with the regulators concluded that required business communications were not being properly retained and supervised.

In the same year, the CFTC levied a $500,000 penalty on UBS. The company believed it was recording calls, but due to a fault in the recording system, some voice files were not linked to specific traders.

An employee assumed these to be test data and redesignated them. This reset the retention time to one day instead of the mandated 5 years. Over 1,000 hours were deleted. UBS only discovered the failure when looking for some recordings that were no longer retained.

In September 2024 the CFTC fined CHS Hedging, $650,000 after roughly 3,000 customer calls went unrecorded across four years. CHS was recording across three separate modern platforms. A routine software update impacted about 1,336 calls and a server reboot after another update left a recording plug-in only partially restarted, costing 638 more. And 468 calls disappeared for a simpler reason: one employee forwarded his work phone to his personal mobile, which recorded nothing at all. CHS self-reported and cooperated. It was still fined.

‘Every few months, it seems there’s some new channel to talk to customers and peers’

The reality is the pressure on compliance teams has never been greater. On paper, communication compliance sounds straightforward: record the interactions, store them securely, and retrieve them when required.

But in most environments, especially ones that have lengthy operations and/or grown through acquisition, modern communication environments are sprawling, fragmented, and constantly changing. Employees move between their desk phones, their mobiles, jump on Teams calls or Zoom meetings, and so on, while trying to work across hybrid working environments. In fact, every few months, it seems there’s some new channel to talk to customers and peers, and you can’t afford to miss any.

In parallel, policies evolve, regulators tighten expectations, and the business expands into attractive new markets—but they all have different retention requirements and privacy rules.

Yet despite this complexity, compliance teams are still expected to guarantee certainty. Either every required interaction is captured, stored, and retrievable, or the organisation is exposed. There’s no safe middle ground for you here.

Which can be unfair: compliance officers are often held accountable for outcomes while lacking full control over the underlying technology stack. Recording systems that sit across multiple vendors, in a legacy platform here but a cloud environment there, from many multiple telecom providers and are accessed in more than one collaboration tool.

That’s where that road to that race to check all your recordings begins. As we’ve said, failures occur silently, but retention settings may drift over time; integrations that worked perfectly last year can break after software updates. One policy inconsistency can create major exposure months later—and so on.

 It’s an unpleasant fact of life that if things go wrong and when regulators knock on your door, “the system failed” is rarely accepted as an excuse. 

Complexity versus control? Why not both

Few of these failures were intentional. They came down to controls that hadn't kept pace with change, over-reliance on fragmented systems, a lack of testing and real visibility, or problems that simply weren't spotted early enough. The reality is we’re all operating in a context where complexity itself has become a risk factor.

But because communication ecosystems are now so convoluted, identifying the root cause can become extremely difficult. Was the issue caused by device configuration? A failed integration? A permissions change? A retention error? A network interruption? A user moving to an unsupported communication channel?

Compliance teams increasingly find themselves responsible for tracing technical problems across environments they do not fully own.

That means that the only alternative to that frantic search is continuous, reliable control and operational resilience. Just recording internal or interactions with clients is no longer enough; you must now be able to always demonstrate that your call recording process aligns with requirements.

It also means that you now need to see communications compliance as a live operational function, not a static ‘solved’ problem. All of the above is integral to Touch Call Recording as a Service.

With Touch, you get a comprehensive, consolidated record of all communications touchpoints and channels, which is protected from unauthorised access or modification. Backed by the highest levels of security, your compliance records are available when you need them, with the same rules applied consistently for all channels.

Touch addresses your headaches, so you can tell your boss that you have:

• Real-time monitoring for recording failures
• Regular integrity testing and checking
• Unified oversight across communication channels
• Clear audit trails
• Centralised compliance reporting
• Resilient cloud architectures
• Automated retention and deletion controls
• A complete, tamper-resistant and secure recording library
• And that you can easily search and retrieve your records
• With consistent governance across all channels used in your organisation

To avoid any more emergency working, it’s not just about call recording capture but also a robust call recording compliance business process that ends risk – and that also offers the monitoring and service guarantees to ensure operational integrity and performance aligned with your needs.

That’s what Touch offers – not only does it meet the real-time demands of active compliance, but it also gives you the entire framework for managing communications recordings. Centralised, traceable and automated, it’s there to give you peace of mind.

The Touch business case

This is where the experience and deep technical competence of a Touch Call Recording could come in for you.

Modern recording and compliance platforms have become dramatically more sophisticated all over. The Touch tech stack that’s been designed from the ground up to eliminate operational risk from call recording and so give you visibility, automation, and assurance across increasingly complex communication environments.

It’s time to face the fact that in modern call recording compliance, there is no permission to fail.
So, want to talk about your fears? Connect with us today and let’s put an end to that potential nightmare for good.