Finance staff go to the Signal in droves encrypted messaging app. And some of the world’s largest financial services companies are getting ahead of the trend by trying out new technology to track employee conversations on it.
Tens of thousands of employees at two global banks and one Asian lender will spend the next 12 weeks testing an app that allows compliance teams to track employee chairs on Signal. The tech also includes the ability to track WhatsApp, which is popular among City employees, and its competitor Telegram.
Hong Kong-based monitoring software provider LeapXpert is developing the tech for three of its major banking messengers, but declined to name the participants in the trial.
“WhatsApp is in vogue today. Tomorrow is Signal and God knows what will come in six months from now, ”Avi Pardo, co-founder and chief operating officer at LeapXpert told Financial News. “An organization needs to be tested in the future for every change in the market.”
Pardo said the technology should be widely available by April.
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This is the latest salvo in what is becoming a perpetual whack-a-mole game between financial services staff and their compliance teams.
The use of WhatsApp has long been an issue for reprimanded finance companies and even firefighters for improperly using and blocking the popular encrypted messaging app. communication through the platform. However, the pandemic prompted banks to reconsider WhatsApp’s ban while a big spike in app usage among home workers prompted a spike in the use of monitoring software to track communication.
But a recent rise in the use of competing Signal and Telegram apps among bankers, traders and portfolio managers has turned such efforts on their head.
A senior compliance officer said it was a “real concern”: “Whoever you keep running after will have a new one, because there are so many different messaging systems,” they said. “You always run a tail. ”
Pardo said the market was “very vibrant”. Trials of his company’s new Signal technology began amid “hype” around the Signal and Telegram messaging apps within the finance department, he said.
Pardo told FN in mid-January that LeapXpert had updated their technology in late 2020 to allow it to track messages sent on Telegram to fund employees using its app.
READ An exodus trader from WhatsApp to Signal creates a blind spot of vigilance for City companies
Other research companies are also taking advantage of the move to WhatsApp alternatives.
Gil Shapira, vice president of business development at Telemessage, which captures communications data for hundreds of financial firms, told FN that his company would release tech that would allow financial firms’ compliance teams to monitor negotiations on Signal “by the end of Q1, or early Q2 at the latest”.
Shapira at Telemessage has previously said that his company needed to see Signal usage grow exponentially before it started developing technology to track messages sent to the app. But he said his company’s position changed once he realized it was easier to develop technology to monitor Signal than initially expected.
Oliver Blower, head of VoxSmart, which pulls texts and photos from WhatsApp for analysis with about 100 financial services clients, told FN that his company was currently testing software that could oversee negotiations on Signal with five financial services companies, including banks and brokers, with a view to bringing it to market within the next three months.
Blower said there was “very urgent demand” from the broking companies as their clients were going to Signal.
Such companies can use several methods to track conversations on an encrypted app. For Signal, for example, some companies tap on a publicly available app programming interface, or open API, that gives developers programmed access. That can allow monitoring providers to develop an alternative registered option that is similar to the messaging app’s user experience but in a way that is easy to follow. Others, like LeapXpert, have developed a messaging app service for financial services employees that acts as a registered channel between the company and various client-side encrypted messaging apps.
People under the control of such technology are usually warned that their conversations are being recorded, receiving a disclaimer stating so at the beginning of conversations with a person being investigated.
Pardo said business communications were kept separate from employee personal messaging apps: “Like having a work email on your phone and a personal email,” he said. “The financial institution only sees the communication on the [LeapXpert’s app] Jump job description. Not on any other messaging request. ”
“LeapXpert never sees the content of the conversations. The privacy of the client and the campaign is ensured at all times, ”he said.
“The bank has a full view of any discussion on the Leap Work application,” said Pardo, noting that companies that use the technology can also set rules about what can and cannot be passed or passed through. app LeapXpert. For example, they can establish rules around which departments or staff can talk externally, who can set up chat rooms or send documents through the system to a certain level of person. work.
The move to Signal and Telegram followed a new set of terms and conditions from WhatsApp, which warned users that the app would share data with Facebook. Even though the new conditions were set only for users outside Europe and the UK, that did not stop people from leaving the platform in droves.
WhatsApp’s parent Facebook quickly made efforts to stop the outflows – saying on January 15 that it was delaying the update of its privacy policy after backlash from users.
A spokesperson for Signal was contacted for comment.
To contact the author of this story with feedback or news, email Lucy McNulty