IRISH FINANCIAL services companies that have recently rolled out fleets of iPhones or Android smartphones to their staff may have problems with a new piece of legislation, which comes into force in the middle of next month.
This legislation comes from British regulatory body the Financial Services Authority.
It will require firms which fall under its guidelines to record their employees’ mobile phone conversations.
Irish firms with operations in Britain will have to comply with this legislation.
Essentially this is nothing new, says Rob Magee, a partner in Dublin-based systems integrator firm Capstone; banks have been recording phone calls for the past 10 years.
The difference here is that this extends beyond fixed line calls to mobile phones.
Capstone is working with these firms to comply with legislation by providing the requisite software for recording and archiving mobile phone calls, which must be retrievable and retained for a period of six months.
The issue of personal privacy is essentially resolved, he explains, because the requirement is only for privately owned, company-issued phones.
In some cases, says Mr Magee, there is a signed agreement on behalf of the employee not to use the phone for work-related calls outside of office hours and the recording can be switched off in this down time.
“Frankly, most traders and people in this sector don’t really mind that they’re being recorded; it’s on a work device.
“This legislation was brought in to curb and limit market abuse such as the case recently in the UK where a rogue trader was using his mobile phone as well as Facebook and Twitter to share confidential information outside of his company.”
Capstone is working exclusively with BlackBerry devices because, Mr Magee says, “very few of the large financial institutions use anything but Blackberry because of BES [BlackBerry Enterprise Server] and its ability to centralise”.
“Our software is written exclusively for BlackBerry devices. It’s an app that resides on the BES and the administrator decides what devices to push it out to so it’s done remotely and very simply,” he adds.
The difficulty for firms who have their staff on other mobile platforms is that recording every phone call on every device involves “a significant and costly project”, including the complete replacement of all SIM cards.
“Apple has not opened up to developers in this manner so there is no solution for the iPhone right now and very few compliant solutions for Android, Symbian and legacy-type devices,” Mr Magee adds.
