New legislation to regulate the financial adviser industry has led to an increase in demand for tools to record email conversations with customers. But in the quest to prove an adviser had given the correct advice and implemented it fairly, the demand for call recording services was rising too, said Call Journey, a company which sold those services.
The Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) Act, introduced in July, “has put a cat amongst the pigeons”, said Andrew Lamrock, director of enterprise intelligence, Call Journey. “FOFA has triggered quite a significant spike in subscriptions. There are a lot of nervous advisers out there right across the financial services sector,” Lamrock said.
FOFA was introduced earlier in the year for small credit holders who now had to play a standard warning before talking to customers on the phone. “If they can’t prove they have played that, and those terms haven’t been shown to the customer, they’re in breach of FOFA,” Lamrock said.
Advisers sometimes chose to play terms and conditions over the phone or send a link to the customer that played the recording.
“Those regulations have really made it difficult to prove verbatim best intent was provided to the customer. So things like recording recommendations for an insurance policy and disclosure of a stock trade, it’s red hot,” Lamrock said.
Call Journey sold call recording services to enterprise companies such as Telstra and government departments and marketed a similar service to SMEs called Record Retrieve.
A sister site to Record Retrieve, 1300Record.com.au, had 1,500 SME customers, the company said.
How Does It Work?
Phone calls can be recorded through cloud software from a mobile phone or a deskphone. An adviser is making an outbound call on a smartphone uses a cloud-recording app to dial the customer. The call is then passed through the recording service’s data centre where both sides of the conversation are captured.
If a customer calls an adviser, the adviser creates a conference call with the recording service so it can log the conversation. Recording services also sell 1300 or geo phone numbers (with prefix 02, 03, 07, etc.) and all calls made to that number are automatically recorded. After the conversation has finished, the adviser can send the customer a link to the recording for their records.
Some recording services offered transcription with pricing starting from $2 a minute depending on turnaround time.
Image credit: Record Retrieve