Customer engagement company Verint; recently announced a new and strategic partnership with Theta Lake. The firm is a leading provider of collaboration security and compliance solutions. 

The partnership could very well have implications for those in the financial and trading organizations, as well as other businesses, according to Verint, which notes: 

"Our extended capabilities will help avoid the legal, business, and reputational consequences of compliance breaches, misconduct, data loss, and security issues."

Verint already has an award-winning cloud-based financial compliance solution, also available on-premises and as a hybrid solution. It supports automated policies and compliance workflows, offers an open approach to ease integration, and extends a broad range of functionalities to keep financial organizations communication-compliant. 

"It also ensures operational assurance and data governance," a spokesperson for Verint wrote in a statement. 

Currently deployed by over 800 financial services organizations globally - Verint’s compliance solutions further enable the capture, retention, transcription, retrieval, and analysis of voice and electronic communications. 

So what is different about this iteration of Verint's technology? According to the company: 

"The partnership and technology integration combines Verint’s communication capture, data management, operational assurance, and analytics offerings with Theta Lake’s automated collaboration risk monitoring and policy supervision technology."

The hope, according to Verint, is to empower financial institutions with a comprehensive set of remote working and management tools as we move toward increased hybrid working. 

 

Automation, Productivity, Security, & Interop

Armed with a new set of capabilities, soon, Verint customers in financial and other derivative industries can automate risk monitoring and access advanced features like voice, video conferencing, chat, screen, and content sharing. 

"They can do so across all major UC platforms including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex by Cisco, Slack, Symphony, RingCentral as well as all leading turret providers (IPC, Cloud9, BT, and Speakerbus) and major mobile MVNOs (Truphone and TeleMessage."

The partnership is primarily about helping companies achieve 'true' operational efficiency by doing things such as identifying risky behavior and putting a stop to it if needed. 

The offering might also keep institutions MiFID II; Dodd-Frank, GDPR, SEC 17a-4, FCA, and SOC 2 compliant. End-users of the combined solution; are set to benefit a lot from omnichannel compliance recording, data governance, and data discovery offering - too. 

They can, for instance, spot early signs of market abuse, uncover collusion and coercive behavior, identify insider trading, prevent data loss, filter sensitive content and receive alerts of potentially illicit/unethical activity. 

Theta Lake Survey GetVoIP News

Theta Lake Survey

This time, it is powered (partially) by Theta Lake’s integrated artificial intelligence and machine learning-backed comms tech. Anthony Cresci, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Operations, and Finance, Theta Lake, believes that these capabilities will come in handy, adding: 

“As a collaboration-first, a hybrid working model emerges in the financial industry and beyond, and with an increased use of video, real-time messaging, screen sharing, and unified communications, new forms of risk arise that regulated firms can’t turn a blind eye to.” 

 He continued, noting: 

"Businesses can more confidently expand their use of collaboration channels and all their features. They can also explore the full functionality by taking a proactive approach to compliance and risk management that automates data leakage detection, acceptable use, data privacy, and regulatory or corporate compliance risks.”

Verint's Senior Vice President, Global Channels and Alliances, John Bourne, said: 

Remote employees continue to diversity the communication channels they use, and along with that comes its own set of challenges - but legacy providers do not offer up a compelling enough solution, he further noted: 

"Yet, legacy solutions and manual approaches to monitoring and risk detection are not built to scale, lack accuracy, and are resource-intensive." 

Theta Lake may be a lesser-known name, but it has some serious clout. It has a multi-award-winning product suite that provides compliance and security for collaboration platforms, like Verint, Webex by Cisco, Microsoft Teams, RingCentral, Zoom, Slack - etc. 

AI comes into play as Theta Lake uses its patented AI to detect and surface regulatory, privacy, and security risks in an AI-assisted review-based workflow across what is shared, shown, spoken, and typed in an organization to ensure full compliance. 

 

The Future of Work Depends on Interoperability 

The way things once were is no more. And that has prompted UC legacy vendors to change their strategies. It did not previously make much business sense to integrate with or offer access to competitor technology. In today's business climate, however, it does. And a growing number of providers have recognized this. 

Employees, now faced with the challenges of working from home, understand that it could take using a few different systems to achieve the (real) idea of UC - unless you have a pure UC offering with every component an employee needs to collaborate internally and externally. 

If this is not the case, you need to play well with others, and Mio is the example of that manifest into a business idea. Interop is all it deals with, and for Mio, it makes a lot of sense, making something so seemingly the opposite of a good business decision - the center of their money-making plan. 

And they aren't doing bad, having recently announced it had raised $8.7 million in a Series A funding round from Zoom and Cisco to boost its efforts in the space. To further prove that notion - a growing number of service providers have lobbied for/enacted ways to further facilitate the mixing and mating of services from various providers. 

Most notably, in 2019, Microsoft and Cisco formed a partnership that enabled WebEx to be used with Microsoft Teams. So while there is an obvious element of competition among service providers, the concept of interop can result in improved end-user and customer experiences. It could also make the cost of doing business, cheaper.

According to Frost and Sullivan, reliability and security; remain key for business leaders when selecting the technologies to collaborate with. The firm notes that reliability represents a concern for (50%) of leaders in business, with security presenting a concern for (47%) of business technology decision-makers.

These are seen as two of the biggest concerns for companies investing in UC technology.

What came in close behind? You guessed it - the open standards of interoperability at 36%. The future of work is forever changed, thanks to the Coronavirus, and that is clear from the level of UCC technologies being implemented in various work environments across the globe.