market for mobile call recording is set to expand rapidly.
The UK market for mobile call recording is poised for significant growth, and with that comes an opportunity for high-quality revenue and margins for the channel. Over the next few years the market size of mobile call recording is likely to increase 40 fold from 30,000, to 1.2 million users, due to changes in regulation and business best practice.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has already mandated that anyone directly involved in equity trading needs to have their mobile calls recorded. This currently applies to over 30,000 workers in the City of London alone - at a cost of £50 - £150 per head, per month to have their mobile calls recorded.
However, in less than 24 months’ time, the European directive MiFID II comes into force, which expands this mandate to anyone involved in giving advice that may lead up to a trade. This includes financial advisers, relationship managers, wealth managers and even commodity traders, who weren’t previously under FCA regulation.
This piece of regulation alone expands the UK call recording market to an expected 500,000 people. Also following the Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) mis-selling scandal, most retail banks are actively seeking solutions to record the mobile phone calls of all their staff, branches, contact-centres or business centres.
This increases the market to everyone working in the financial services sector, being around 1.2m people. Clearly, as the market expands to a potential 1.2 million users, and a more diverse range of companies, the specification and price point of call recording solutions will also have to change.
While global trading houses may be comfortable paying up to £150 per month to have the mobile phone calls of their top traders recorded, this is a price-point that is simply out of reach for most companies.
Equally, most companies are unlikely to cancel their existing mobile phone contracts, or enter an early renewal, to simply accommodate call recording. Instead, many will prefer to explore an overlaid call recording service that enables compliance, compatible with whatever handset, mobile service or contract the organisation may already have in place.
We are fortunate enough to have over 300 major financial services using our smartnumbers service - which until today, has been focused on providing resilience and compliance for our customers’ fixed-line estates.
In order to design the next generation of mobile call recording services we asked our customers what they were looking for from a solution. From this, we identified 9 key mobile call recording requirements that are common across customers both large and small:
- Compliant: Any solution will need to work within the current and future parameters defined by the FCA and MiFID II.
- Affordable: While global investment banks have deep pockets for call recording, paying up to £150 per month per head, it is not a reasonable price point for the whole market. An acceptable market price for a solution is likely to be an extra £10 - £20 over a standard bill.
- Simple to Implement: Given many firms that occupy the market are small, or micro firms without any IT support, an easily implementable system is essential.
- Compatible with alternative mobility strategies: Firms operate differently, it is important for any recording solution to work with the strategies that are already in place, be these corporate provided devices, BYOD or a combination of these.
- Controls to ensure business calls are recorded, while ensuring personal calls remain private.
- Supports existing premises-based solutions for the storage and retrieval of recorded calls.
- Support cloud-based solutions for storage and retrieval of recorded calls
- Ubiquitous: Works across all network providers and mobile handsets .
- Enables a subscriber to keep their mobile number.
By understanding this ‘checklist’ of requirements, telecoms providers can best identify the right solution to represent and capitalise upon this growing opportunity. Furthermore, by delivering a good solution for call recording today, you are also opening doors to new opportunities with customers tomorrow.