Theta Lake, a leader in DCGA, has unveiled its sixth annual report, revealing significant insights into the adoption of Gen AI in the financial services sector.
The study, which surveyed 500 IT and compliance professionals across the US and UK, highlights a landscape fraught with regulatory challenges and a surge in the use of Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) tools.
Amidst an environment of record-breaking regulatory fines exceeding $4bn, the report sheds light on the intensifying complexity of digital communication management within financial services. A staggering 97% of respondents are apprehensive about deploying GenAI capabilities, reflecting broad concerns about the potential risks associated with these technologies. Despite these concerns, the adoption of digital tools continues to grow, with 85% of firms now using more than four different communication and collaboration tools, a notable increase from previous years.
The majority of firms (58%) expressed concerns regarding the reconciliation of records across their communication tools, emphasizing the difficulty in maintaining compliance with stringent regulatory requirements. Additionally, over 40% of respondents are worried about the implications of using summarization and note-taking tools, which could complicate compliance efforts.
Furthermore, the report indicates that many organizations are grappling with non-unified archiving and voice recording tools, which complicate the capture, archiving, reconciliation, supervision, and surveillance of communications. This has prompted nearly half of regulated organizations to block certain apps or features to mitigate compliance risks, as noted by Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst at Metrigy.
Devin Redmond, Co-founder and CEO of Theta Lake, commented on the findings, stating, “What this year really reveals is really that firms continue to accelerate their adoption of unified communication and collaboration tools. The modern workplace is in full effect around those tools, and I think any conversations about the hybrid workplace are gone, and it’s simply a matter of firms using these new tools.”
Redmond highlighted the finding that over 85% use four or more communication tools, symbolising an increasing deepening of usage of those tools.
What are some of the trends that this report showcases are leading in the industry right now? Redmond raised the shift to focus on how firms get visibility into what tools they’re using and the settings they have on such tools – defined as what features and being used and how do you unify your archiving capabilities so that you can actually look across different communication types.
“You can actually monitor not just voice or not just email, but monitor communication that might have a voice call and an email followed by a chat followed by an SMS, all in one centralized place, and I think that’s something that organizations are really focused on going forward,” said Redmond.
Another trend emphasised by Redmond is the use of Gen AI in both the comms environment but also the compliance tools around that environment.
“There’ll be a lot of focus on it, but it’s still one of those areas where there are a lot of question marks. How do I adopt it effectively? What am I going to be able to do to cover in that adoption and make sure that I’m doing the right things from a compliance perspective,” asked Redmond.
What does this report mean going forward for the industry? “From a recommendation perspective, I think the faster organisations can start a journey to modernise their digital communications governance and archiving infrastructure, the better they’re going to be able to respond to regulatory requirements and inquiries.
“I think one of the big trends that continues is more fines than ever around the off-channel and poor record keeping and even increasingly supervision fines. It an increasing expectation that firms will be required to do more monitoring over time – so the recommendation is to increase speed on that journey by figuring out how you’re going to unify the capture of all these communications and how you’re going to monitor your configuration health” said Redmond.
He went on, “In summary, one of the key considerations for firms is how do they move on that journey faster and start adopting an approach that unifies their digital communications, governance and archiving the same way that their unified communications and collaboration tools operate,”.
Find the survey here.
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