Global Relay has published its 2025/26 Data Insights: Communications Capture Trends report, now in its third annual edition and rapidly becoming a reference point for how regulated financial institutions manage their communications obligations. Drawing on data from more than 12,000 regulated financial institutions using Global Relay’s connectors, the survey tracks which channels firms are archiving, how patterns are shifting, and what this reveals about priorities in recordkeeping and surveillance.
The top-line picture is one of continuity and sharp change in equal measure. Email remains dominant, with 89% of surveyed firms archiving it, while LinkedIn personal accounts and Microsoft Teams are both captured by around 23% of firms, with MS Teams now rising to the third most frequently captured channel, a spot previously occupied by Bloomberg. This shift reflects not only usage trends but the broader industry expectation that platforms must now “play nicely” with regulated workflows – a theme raised repeatedly in recent practitioner discussions. Newer channels reflect significant growth in this latest survey:- ChatGPT capture and archive has surged by nearly 3,000% year-on-year as generative AI becomes embedded in workflows.
- WhatsApp capture has risen 36%, with the majority of capturing firms based in the US.
- Apple Messaging capture has increased by 114%, reflecting the iPhone’s centrality on the trading floor and in advisory teams.
- Social-media capture continues to grow, with a 2,000% increase in the number of firms capturing TikTok, while X (formerly Twitter) declined from 20% in 2023 to 14% in the latest survey.
To understand what lies behind these numbers, and how the third survey compares with earlier years, RegTech Insight caught up with Don McElligott, VP Compliance, Global Relay, to talk through the results and the reality he sees on the ground.
Asked what stood out in this year’s analysis, McElligott went straight to the rise of GenAI-mediated communication and how quickly it has been pulled into the compliance perimeter.
He describes a simple rule of thumb he has heard from compliance teams: “Would you be having that conversation if you didn’t work here? If the answer is no, then capture is the rule.” The twist, of course, is that an increasing proportion of those conversations are no longer with another person. They are with AI assistants and productivity tools – reflecting a structural shift in how regulated communications are generated, consumed and supervised.
LinkedIn Rising
Of the social channels, McElligott notes that LinkedIn has become a core part of how advisers and sales teams build relationships: “Firms are feeling like there’s good business to be had communicating on LinkedIn.” While this trend appears consistently in the data, it also mirrors what practitioners acknowledge informally: LinkedIn is now one of the few social platforms where a client might realistically begin a professional engagement with an adviser, something far less plausible on text or X/Twitter.
By contrast, text and Twitter/X appear to be falling as meaningful acquisition channels for forming new client relationships, with X declining from 20% of firms capturing in 2023 to 14% in 2025. Firms may still advertise there, but as McElligott notes, “nobody’s gonna start working with an investment advisor because they got tweeted at.”
TikTok also featured strongly in the numbers, with a 2,000% rise in firms capturing it, driven in part by rising regulatory scrutiny of “finfluencer” marketing and misleading promotions. Younger investors increasingly expect engagement through short-form, mobile-first channels, and firms can no longer assume these interactions fall outside the regulatory perimeter – generational dynamics are increasingly shaping platform relevance, whether or not senior compliance practitioners personally use TikTok.
WhatsApp
WhatsApp use continues to rise while fines are decreasing, prompting an obvious question: Are firms genuinely becoming more compliant, or has regulatory attention simply shifted elsewhere? Enforcement cycles in the US and UK have historically come in waves, and this pattern may still be in play.
McElligott observes: “WhatsApp got all the headlines because that’s where the really big fines were … there was some blatant misuse but it’s one of many different platforms. There’s kind of a long tail at the back end of the survey of Telegram WhatsApp and Signal, and all these other ways to communicate, and there really isn’t too much difference.”
On the vendor side, platform behaviour is also shifting. “Meta was actually quite upset about being lumped in with this,” McElligott notes, referring to the high-profile JP Morgan fine. “They didn’t want their name dragged into that, so it brought them to the table, willing to let a firm like ours capture WhatsApp.” This aligns with a broader industry movement where major tech firms, including Apple with its opening up of Apple Messages, are recognising that if they want to serve regulated industries, they must enable compliant capture and monitoring by design.
Regulators Want Guardrails, Not Attestations
It is clear that regulatory tolerance for “policy-only” approaches no longer suffices. McElligott is explicit: “I don’t think that flies anymore. I think the regulators are leaning on firms to say … next time we come around you better have a solution because there’s plenty of tech out there to capture whatever it is you use. They’re no longer tolerant of just the attestation that says, ‘I’m playing by the rules’ – they want to see some real guardrails in place.”
The third iteration of Global Relay’s survey shows just how dynamically e-comms deployments are evolving; the firms that thrive will be those whose communications governance can move just as fast.
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