The business world, and particularly the financial industry with its stricter security needs to protect trading communications, has not been as quick as consumers to give up on BlackBerry, but has also needed a way to retain SMS text message communications.
Last week’s launch by mobile network and mobile recording provider Truphone of its SMS recording service for all devices, including Android and iPhone, makes it easier for financial firms to cope with the decline of BlackBerry, while retaining the same level of security, as Paul Liesching, global head of financial markets at Truphone, explains.
“Enterprise security measures have been applied as a secondary consideration and as a result the ability to record SMS has been overlooked — and difficult or impossible to apply retrospectively,” he says. “The only way to record Apple SMS is from the core of the network. It is possible to record Android SMS but only via an application which is difficult to support and manage — and can potentially be circumnavigated.”
In a manner similar to Apple SMS texts only being possible to capture from a core of a network, Truphone controls its own global mobile network, and therefore can capture SMS texts at the core of that network, according to Liesching. As a result, it does not matter what smartphone handset is being used.
Aside from the ability to archive SMS texts that concern trading or transactions for a firm’s internal purposes, regulations require recording and storage of all such communications, Liesching notes. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission have such rules, and the European Union’s upcoming MiFID II regulation contains similar provisions.
“Because all financial institutions have been BlackBerry users, SMS communication has been recorded by default,” says Liesching. “When these organisations move to Android and Apple, their compliance departments require continuity of record keeping and therefore need to continue to record SMS.”
Truphone officials said at the time of the launch that a US Tier 1 investment bank had signed on to use the service.
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