FaceTime Communications, the leading provider of solutions that control greynets and manage Unified Communications in the enterprise, today announced that its IMAuditor software enables financial organisations to comply with the new Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) that will go into effect 1 November, 2007 within the 30 states of the European Economic Area.
FaceTime products, used in conjunction with appropriate records retention solutions, enable financial services organizations to comply with elements of the new MiFID regulations by logging, archiving, storing and retrieving instant messaging (IM) conversations in line with guidelines.
The MiFID directive introduces a single market and regulatory regime for investment services within these member states. Most companies that are involved in trading in financial instruments will be affected, in addition to businesses that deal in advisory services. MiFID replaces the Investment Services Directive (ISD), and all organisations covered by ISD will be affected, including investment banks, market data companies, trading platforms and exchanges.
The Financial Services Authority (FSA), which is responsible for the regulation of the securities industry in the United Kingdom, will incorporate MiFID into its FSA Handbook. According to the new regulation, IM is required to be recorded when orders are received over this electronic communication medium. Data must be stored for a three year period in a format readily accessibly by the FSA, and it must not be possible to alter or manipulate the records.
FaceTime's portfolio of products including RTGuardian, IMAuditor and Unified Security Gateway enable the security and compliance of public and enterprise instant messaging use over an organization's network. FaceTime works with strategic partners such as Microsoft and IBM, in addition to email compliance and archiving partners such as Clearswift, Proofpoint and AXS-One, to provide interoperable, easy-to-manage solutions for comprehensive IM and e-mail security and compliance for both enterprise IM and Unified Communications suites as well as hybrid approaches that incorporate separate email and consumer IM networks.
"Financial organizations are realising that there are some elements of MiFID that aren't covered by their traditional IT infrastructures, which are often designed to secure more static communications like email," said Nick Sears, Vice Presdident, EMEA, for FaceTime. "Real-time communications behave differently on the network, and therefore require a different approach to security and management."