16/05/2011

By Scott Thompson

TeleWare has launched what is pitched as the first “clientless” mobile call recording solution for financial services organisations to meet new FSA rules. The rules govern conversations on mobile phones and come into effect on 14 November.

“When, in March 2008, the FSA mandated that all telephone calls should be recorded, the authority made an exemption for calls via mobile phones as, at that time, there were technical limitations on the practicality of recording mobile calls,” says Steve Haworth, CEO at TeleWare..

He adds that the launch of TeleWare Mobile Recording means there is no longer any technical limitation. The solution records any call, to and from most widely available mobile phones on any operating system, with the entire call along with destination, date and time stamp held on an encrypted, high availability storage platform for up to 10 years.

TeleWare, in partnership with two independent national telecommunication carriers, is testing the solution using thousands of simultaneous calls equating to hundreds of hours of recordings. “Our call recording solution is built into the mobile tariff and starts from around £14 per user per month in addition to the standard rental. The solution scales from a small sole trader all the way to an organisation with 10,000 mobile users. Implementation at, say, a small brokerage firm with 20 traders takes less than a week and requires no additional IT equipment on premises,” Haworth adds.

The technical limitation of previous mobile call recording solutions included a need to place a small software application on each device to handle recording. These ‘clients’ could be circumvented and also needed to be updated constantly as device operating systems evolved. Another method of mobile call recording is to re-route all mobile voice calls to a centralised hub packed with banks of call recording equipment. This solution requires firms to absorb huge additional upfront costs, higher per call charges and fails to scale during periods of higher than normal demand.

“The exemption made by the FSA was reasonable at the time but we have solved the inherent problems with a simple and elegant solution – we place the call recording within the mobile network itself!” says Haworth. “Every call is recorded as it passes through the network so there is no need for any device clients or re-routing and the call recording policy cannot be circumvented.”