Data Archival Compliance for Banks & Finance Institutions

Updated On : September 2019

The financial industry is excessively regulated with a lot of data that needs to be monitored and reported so that it can stay protected and compliant with all the regulations. Perhaps the most important aspect of regulatory compliance for banks and financial institutions is record keeping and archiving electronic communication data. It is mandatory to capture, monitor and archive all business related communication data for review, audits, eDiscovery, litigation, and compliance.

In data archiving, data that is no longer actively used is moved to a separate storage device for long-term retention. This archived data has older data that is still relevant to the organization and may be needed for future reference. It also consists of data that must be retained for regulatory compliance. All data archives are indexed and have search capabilities that allow files and parts of files to be easily located and retrieved.

The need to archive data

• Besides the obvious reason that mandates archiving so that business is regulated, another reason is data leakage. Proprietary data and customer information is confidential and hence cannot be shared, either purposefully or accidentally. The use of social media and emails on mobile devices increases the risk of data getting shared.
• An archiving solution can provide protection with an oversight if there is a threat against insider trading, inappropriate financial advice, and stating personal beliefs about a financial investment. Employees will be aware of communication being stored and accessed for review. With data monitoring, filtering, and blocking there is protection against inappropriate, sensitive, proprietary or other types of content from ever being posted.
• Archiving increases business productivity by improving email system performance, and reducing downtime, as messages can be deleted from the live system once archived. It can also reduce strain on the IT staff with end users directly accessing the archive.
• Archiving is crucial for eDiscovery, information requests, and litigation preparation. In case of litigation, it is required to produce all electronic communication data relevant to a case including emails, instant messaging, social media, and data created on mobile devices.
• An archive brings in actionable business insights. With access to every email, IMs between employees, social media post or customer interaction through text, there is a lot of information available.

How to stay compliant

It is important to have an archiving software solution that automatically assists in preparing to respond to any compliance audit, litigation or information request for any business communication data. An efficient data archiving solution archives all communication data in one central location for easy search, eDiscovery, and exporting needs. Everything from email, instant messages, social media, web searches, to mobile device communication is stored. It saves individual employees the trouble of searching for data on separate machines or plugging in and syncing phones to backup their mobile messages. Also, the nuisance of duplicate emails filling up and slowing down the server is no longer there.

A customised data archival and reporting solution for banks and financial institutions is necessary for migration or to retire legacy systems.

• A customised data archival and reporting solution can improve an organisation's productivity by helping to spend less time managing and maintaining on-premises backup storage infrastructure and software. It simplifies backup and data archiving with backup-as-a-service and hybrid storage solutions that easily restore data and applications from the cloud.
• A customised data archival and reporting solution helps to take advantage of policies designed to meet business or regulatory compliance needs. It helps to benefit from the most comprehensive compliance portfolio available and can get as much or more than 99 years of retention for backup data.
• A customised data archival and reporting solution will move backup storage to the cloud to save on infrastructure investments for remote and branch offices. It will also replace expensive intranets with low-cost internet and archive data in the preferred regions across the globe, helping the data to be close to a branch office while maintaining enterprise grade security for data in transit & at rest.

Hence, it is important to look for a solution which can

• Handle archival from retired or migrated applications
• Support data purging
• Provide standard reports, MIS, user logs
• Facilitate queries on archived data