FSA mobile recording compliance and the working holiday.

It’s August and the City has that almost peaceful summer feel, as its workers migrate to hotter climes for their “Worlidays”. Worlidays, a name created by Lucy Kellaway describes the sort of holidays many of us take these days, not least traders and customer teams in investment banking: not at work, but invariably available at the end of their BlackBerry.

Of course, away from their desk and fixed-line recorders, trade or transaction-related conversations are banned, [and of course they never happen do they??] making worlidays dreadfully dull. Next year that will change as regulated firms comply with the UK FSA‘s mobile taping rule, CP10-17, which comes into force on 14th November this year.

Ensuring that the conversations are recorded reliably, in whatever far-off land takes their traders’ fancy presents a potential pitfall for those in IT and Voice Communications tasked with selecting the right mobile recording solution. Not all recording solutions work on all networks in all countries. This is especially true for those that rely on network controls to route calls through their recording infrastructure. Those that use the CAMEL protocol are particularly problematic—the protocol is completely absent from 25% of the world and only partially present in many other countries—the same applies for other solutions like conference call-based ones that are reliant on both in-network conferencing functions and short-code dialing features (“audio DTMF”) to both work and ensure users aren’t left “hanging on the telephone” while calls are set up (to quote Debbie Harry).

So if you’ve got the task of sorting out your traders' mobile phone recording remember: ensuring they have a seamless, unimpaired call experience in London is one thing. Dictating where they can and can’t go on holiday is quite another.