Three’s Mobile Call Recording service first of its kind in Ireland

A new service from Three Ireland will assist financial services organisations meet their obligations under the EU MIFID (Markets in Financial Instruments) II directive as well as help resolve disputes between companies and their customers.

Set to launch in July, the new Mobile Call Recording service is the first of its kind in Ireland and offers the facility to record automatically all mobile calls and text messages and store them securely for seven years or longer.

“Our customers came to us with a challenge,” says Three business product portfolio manager Ciara O’Reilly. “Many of them faced a new set of regulatory requirements as a result of the MIFID II directive which is designed to offer greater protection and transparency for investors. There are lots of other elements to it as well. Financial services organisations will have to record every single communication, voice or text, mobile or fixed line, email or web messaging, the whole lot.”

People joke about their mobile calls being monitored and recorded but it's not that easy to do

While recording solutions exist for fixed-line phone systems, nothing similar is available for mobiles.

“People joke about their mobile calls being monitored and recorded but it’s not that easy to do,” says O’Reilly. “We spent a lot of time working on it to make sure the solution meets customer objectives and doesn’t impact on the way they work.”

She explains that the system goes beyond merely having a recording facility. “They have to record every single thing and ensure that no one can get around the system and have any communications which are not recorded,” she says. “And they have to be able to prove to the regulators that they have such a system in place.”

Existing recording apps were investigated. “There are some apps out there, but they are not very satisfactory,” O’Reilly notes. “You have to go into the app to record the call. Also, they are not robust enough in terms of ensuring that all communications are recorded.

“They work well in terms of what they are intended to do but don’t meet the regulatory requirement. If you just record calls for training and quality purposes, there are a number of different options but none of them offer a solution for the financial services sector.

“We spent a long time talking to customers about their requirements. We did look at the possibility of developing an app, but it could be got around quite easily. We didn’t want to present an if or but scenario to our customers; we knew they needed to have certainty.”

The Three product meets these requirements. “It’s sim and network based and is completely seamless for the end user. People use their phones in work in the normal way and the recording is done in the depths of the network. Once there is a Three sim in the phone the service works as soon as it is switched on, you don’t have to put any software or apps on any phones and you don’t have to have every phone connected to the service, just those which will be used for commercial transactions. It works when the user is roaming and for international calls.”

People can ask for personal conversations to be deleted

Regulatory requirements are only part of the story. “Having all communications recorded is also very good from a dispute resolution point of view,” she adds. “If a customer says they ordered something, or didn’t order something, and the bank or retailer is able to produce a recording to prove exactly what was said it could save a lot of trouble.”

The service is also GDPR compliant. “People can ask for personal conversations to be deleted. The other thing that works really well from the customer perspective is reporting. All calls and texts for the past seven years, or even longer if the customer requires, are stored in the cloud and are easily retrieved using a specially designed web interface by a superuser or any other person authorised to access it.”

There are encrypted and unencrypted available, depending on the level of security required by customers. “Financial services organisations will require the encrypted service but if it’s an online retailer recording calls for training and quality purposes they probably won’t,” O’Reilly adds.

Work began on the new service towards the end of 2018 and it will launch on the market in July. “We are quite excited about it,” says O’Reilly.

“We are the first in Ireland with such a service. It might sound simple but recording all calls and messages, archiving and storing them for seven years or longer is actually quite difficult to get right. Every call is recorded automatically, and nothing is stored on the phone. All data is stored in central location here in Ireland with no impact on the phone’s performance or data usage.”