The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (more commonly known as the Dodd-Frank Act) was one of the most significant reforms the financial industry has ever seen.

It was introduced by the US Government following the 2007 financial crisis, with the aim of encouraging greater financial stability by increasing accountability and transparency in the system, ending bailouts by the taxpayer and preventing misleading financial advice. Similar to the EU’s MiFID II it has had wide-ranging and complex implications for all financial organisations.

Call recording of financial transactions

One of the main reforms introduced by the Dodd-Frank Act was the need to record all calls (fixed and mobile) – as well as other digital messages – that could lead to a financial transaction. And, since it’s difficult to know which conversations may lead to a transaction, this means that all conversations need to be recorded in order to ensure compliance with the regulations.

Under the act all files have to be uniformly time-stamped, securely stored as a digital file, and be easily searchable and accessible for regulatory and audit purposes. These files must be stored for the duration of the transaction and for 5 years after that.

Dodd-Frank also legislated for the monitoring of the previously unregulated swaps market – which is a derivative contract involving the exchange of cash flows or liabilities between two financial organisations. As traditionally swaps were arranged over the phone, there was a lack of transparency into the process. Again, these calls must now be recorded, tagged to be fully searchable and stored for 5 years.

Write Once Ready Many (WORM)

One of the stipulations of the act was that all digital files must be stored as in the Write Once Ready Many (WORM) format – this means that conversations can be stored and accessed over a long period of time, but crucially that once they are written they cannot be altered or erased for the duration of the retention period.

Cloud-hosted call recording for Dodd-Frank

Legacy recording solutions have historically been used to retain control over their data by storing recorded conversations on-premise. However, it quickly became clear that legacy systems were not up to the job, and required significant resources – from expansion of storage as the number of files grew, and costly and time-consuming maintenance and upgrade requirements. That’s why many enterprises are turning to hosted and managed call recording solutions.

Touch Call Recording Service is a complete managed service and takes away the headache of regulatory compliance, whether that’s Dodd-Frank, MiFID/ MiFID II, GDPR or any other regulations or legislation. As a complete managed service, it requires neither CAPEX nor a lengthy deployment cycle. It is highly flexible and highly scalable with no limits to the retention period and storage capacity.

Touch Call Recording Service offers a managed multi-channel solution. The service currently supports more than 40 different enterprise communication solutions, including landlines, PBXs, mobile phones, SMS, chat, Bloomberg, Eikon, Microsoft Teams, and many others. Additional channels can easily be added to the portfolio.

Secure access and retrieval of call recordings

An easy-to-use Web-Portal offer access to recordings and accompanying services. The service enables training, clear tracking of audit trails, quality assurance, risk management, compliance, documentation, dispute resolution, increased productivity, and improved customer service.

Touch Call Recording Service guarantees that financial organisations of all sizes can meet all their Dodd-Frank compliance regulations. Get in touch now, to find out how we can help.