Time is running out! Are you MiFID II compliant yet?

“Now is the time for com­pa­nies oper­at­ing in the money mar­ket and in order/​contract man­age­ment to get on with imple­ment­ing the new finan­cial mar­kets direc­tive MiFID II – both in their own inter­ests and to gain greater client trust”, says our expert Markus Kossin, a con­sul­tant in the field of con­tact cen­tres at IP Dynam­ics (MiFID = Mar­kets in Finan­cial Instru­ments Di-​rective, 2004/​39/​EC).

BaFin, the super­vi­sory author­ity for banks and finan­cial ser­vice providers, insur­ance com­pa­nies and secu­ri­ties trad­ing in Ger­many, is respon­si­ble for the sec­ond amend­ment to the finan­cial mar­kets direc­tive. The only com­pa­nies that will be able to con­tinue work­ing are those ver­i­fied as hav­ing the tech­nol­ogy to incor­po­rate the new reg­u­la­tions and require­ments on all media chan­nels. The Euro­pean Union direc­tive on har­mon­is­ing the finan­cial mar­kets in the Euro­pean domes­tic mar­ket con­cerns the fol­low­ing key aspects in the field of con­tact cen­tres and will take effect on 3 Jan­u­ary 2018.

• Oblig­a­tion to cre­ate and retain records: the length of time required for keep­ing records has been increased from one to seven years (i.e. switch to con­fig­urable data reten­tion direc­tives).
• Media channels/​co-​browsers: syn­chro­nous voice call and screen record­ing (i.e. sup­port for all browsers as well as the tech­ni­cal con­ver­gence of voice and screen data for syn­chro­nous record­ing).
• Technology/​security: sav­ing unchanged actions and spo­ken or writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tion (i.e. sav­ing every­thing together with no sub­se­quent changes).
• Technology/​access rights: who may or may not access records; who has accessed records and when (i.e. secure access checks and audit logs).
• Technology/​encryption: industry-​standard encryp­tion and dig­i­tal water­marks.
• Secu­rity stan­dards: SSL cer­tifi­cates and PCI-​DSS (i.e. com­pli­ance with secu­rity stan­dards).

The advice from our expert Markus Kossin, who has already man­aged sev­eral projects, is clear: “Rout­ing and sta­tis­tics are not affected by MiFID. How­ever, records of all PC and phone con­ver­sa­tions and inter­ac­tions have to be tracked, securely saved and retained under the new finan­cial mar­kets direc­tive. Every­thing has to be trans­par­ent, con­tin­u­ously recorded and unchanged in order to com­ply with the revised finan­cial mar­kets direc­tive.”

For con­tact cen­tres and the use of Skype for Busi­ness, this means:

• Regard­less of the type of com­mu­ni­ca­tions chan­nel (Skype for Busi­ness, fixed-​line or mobile phone calls, emails and let­ters or ver­bal pri­vate con­tracts), there is an infor­ma­tion and record-​keeping require­ment.
• This record-​keeping require­ment applies to all cor­re­spon­dence, con­sul­ta­tions or orders and all inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion, no mat­ter what form, that is/​may be/​is intended to be used to con­clude a money mar­ket or con­trac­tual trans­ac­tion. The length of time required to keep records has also been increased from one to seven years. In tech­ni­cal terms, this specif­i­cally means that data from both stan­dard con­tact cen­tre media chan­nels (calls, chat, email) and newer media chan­nels such as co-​browsing (call and on-​screen inter­ac­tions) or social media will have to be recorded and retained in even larger data­base sys­tems.
• More­over, for a legal trans­ac­tion to be valid, every client must be informed that the inter­ac­tion is being recorded at the begin­ning of the record­ing process. This is done via the mod­ern sys­tems and com­po­nents of the con­tact cen­tre for voice and infor­ma­tion announce­ments.

IP Dynam­ics can pro­vide you with a com­plete ser­vice pack­age to ensure that you meet the require­ments in 2017 ahead of the dead­line. In addi­tion to all the media chan­nels for con­tact cen­tres using the lat­est tech­nol­ogy, you will receive:

• The nec­es­sary record­ing and qual­ity man­age­ment sys­tems for all media chan­nels.
• A com­pre­hen­sive check and analy­sis of data­base capac­i­ties for retain­ing records and mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions.
• Proof of com­pli­ance with MiFID II reg­u­la­tions.

A check of exist­ing resources together with expert opin­ions and rec­om­men­da­tions is an inte­gral com­po­nent of the plan­ning and imple­men­ta­tion process.

Talk to us about ensur­ing your con­tact cen­tre is com­pli­ant with MiFID II.