Upcoming Webinar: Managing Off-Channel Communications Compliance
Date: 10 June 2026
Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET
Duration: 50 minutes
The compliance challenge around off-channel communications has moved beyond the familiar narrative of WhatsApp messages on personal phones. Today, the real issue confronting firms has become communication sprawl: conversations occurring across messaging apps, collaboration platforms, social media direct messages, personal email, and even messaging tools embedded within trading and workflow applications. Regulators’ expectations focus on whether firms can demonstrate knowing where business communications occur and can capture, analyse, record and retrieve them on demand.
Recent regulatory guidance reinforces this sharpened focus. In its latest supervisory guidance, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) highlighted weaknesses in how firms monitor for unapproved channels, retain business-related messages, and oversee third-party surveillance solution vendors. The regulator emphasised the need for firms to actively monitor for behavioural signals that employees may be moving communications away from approved systems, test surveillance programmes regularly, and ensure that policies clearly define permitted and prohibited communication channels.
The challenge is no longer just blocking unauthorised apps but establishing credible governance over a constantly evolving communication landscape – including third-party collaboration tools, multilingual messaging, vendor capture systems, and hybrid work environments. This webinar will explore how firms are moving from reactive enforcement responses to proactive supervision models that can detect channel migration early, validate capture capabilities, and provide defensible evidence of compliance.
By attending this webinar, you will learn:
- How regulators are refining expectations for off-channel communications surveillance across messaging apps, collaboration tools, and embedded platform messaging
- Practical strategies to detect behavioural signals that employees may be moving communications off approved channels
- How firms are validating vendor capture and archiving systems to ensure regulatory-grade recordkeeping and retrieval
- Governance approaches for messaging within third-party applications, services and collaboration platforms
- How surveillance programmes are adapting to multilingual messaging and hybrid work environments
Speakers:
More about our speakers:
Paul Cottee
Director, Financial Markets Compliance
NICE Actimize
Paul Cottee is a Director in the Product group at NICE. Paul worked in FICC front-office roles before becoming a compliance officer with a major UK asset manager, then regional head of surveillance for a major investment bank. He has been in the vendor space for over 8 years. He has worked in Sydney, London, Singapore and New York.
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