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Year-on-year trends for communication capture
How has communication capture changed over the past five years?
In order to establish compliant communication capture, this section draws on Global Relay’s Connector purchase data, which shows the most popular Connectors over the past five years. Unlike other data featured within this report, this is not cumulative data for Connector accounts, but rather a year-on-year analysis of the Connectors in which firms showed the most interest in a given year.
In 2019, 85% of Connector implementations were focused on email. Pre-pandemic, the financial services landscape was digitalizing at a steady pace, but relied heavily on traditional communication methods: email for internal and external communications, Instant Bloomberg (Bloomberg Chat) for financial communication.
As has become a repeating theme throughout this report, the percentage of firms looking to capture LinkedIn communication data fell only one percentage point under those capturing Bloomberg data. While this may be unexpected, a Business of Apps report shows that LinkedIn had 604 million users in 2019, and was already established as a critical business tool.
Having only been launched in 2017, MS Teams had not yet established itself as a widely used internal communication tool, with firms continuing to use email and Instant Bloomberg (Bloomberg Chat) to communicate.
The effect of COVID-19 on business communications
2020 saw the widespread shutdown of on-premise offices owing to COVID-19 lockdowns. As a result, workforces turned to digital communication channels. While the number of purchase decisions for email dropped by 5%, the number of financial institutions looking to implement MS Teams capture jumped significantly to 28% of inquiries. While falling behind MS Teams, Instant Bloomberg Connectors similarly rose from 18% in 2019 to 23% in 2020.
This trend towards email, LinkedIn, and MS Teams Connectors persists into 2021. What we also see, however, is the gradual increase of firms investing in Connectors for SMS/Text – jumping from 15% of adoption to 30%. Conventional financial messaging tools, such as Instant Bloomberg, fell further down the chain of demand.
How regulatory enforcement changed communication capture
At the tail-end of 2021, the first significant fine for recordkeeping failures surrounding WhatsApp and use of personal devices/channels was announced – issued to JPMorgan Chase. In September 2022, yet more substantial fines were issued to firms for their failure to capture WhatsApp and SMS/Text.
It is clear to see how those enforcement actions affected the decisions of compliance teams to invest in communications capture solutions. In 2022, the year after the first enforcement, investment in WhatsApp capture and the Global Relay App mobile solution rose significantly, indicating a desire to connect such data types to compliant archives.
So far, in 2023, that trend has continued, with WhatsApp Connectors rising to account for 22% of Connector purchases. Text messages account for 32% of Connectors purchases in 2023, while Global Relay App – which captures text, IM, and WhatsApp compliantly – accounts for 41%.
