Survey Finds Regulated Organizations Continue to Ramp Up Collaboration Tool Usage, but Compliance, Security, and Supervision Concerns Persist
Theta Lake Survey Highlights Compliance Friction and Challenges in Adoption of Leading Video, Voice, and Chat Platforms
Theta Lake, a leader in modern collaboration security and compliance solutions, today released its annual benchmark report titled Modern Communications Survey Report: The Security and Compliance Risks of Collaboration Tool Usage in Financial Services. Surveying 100 key executives across financial services, Theta Lake found that 83% of respondents are turning off key productivity and usability features of collaboration platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Webex due to their organizations’ technical inability to adhere to relevant regulatory compliance and security requirements.
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“Data and experience show that employees, partners, and customers want to collaborate, communicate, and share information on Webex while their organizations require integrated security and compliance capabilities to safely meet this demand”
Theta Lake’s analysis showed that the exponential adoption of collaboration tools since early 2020, coupled with a reliance on legacy archiving and supervision technology built for email, has challenged financial services firms. While 91% of financial services professionals reported using two to six collaboration tools, nearly two-thirds (63%) were concerned about the ability to share data and communicate in ways that circumvented email-based monitoring and archiving. That directly correlated to 83% of respondents broadly disabling features such as whiteboarding, screensharing, and meeting chat, instead of strategically implementing purpose-built technologies to ensure compliance and enable collaboration and productivity.
“The pandemic is said to have ‘turbo-charged’ digitalization which has brought both benefits and challenges,” commented Susannah Hammond, Senior Regulatory Intelligence Expert at Thomson Reuters. “New, hybrid, ways of working bring new risks – regulators are geography neutral – it doesn’t matter to them whether you are working from an office, or your garden shed, you still need to be able to evidence compliance and compliant activities. Pandemic regulatory forbearance is coming to an end and regulators will expect risk and control infrastructures to have kept pace with shifting and flexible working practices.”
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Key report findings reveal that:
- The top three collaboration features considered to be threats or challenges to privacy and security include: files uploaded or transferred in chats, links shared in chats or onscreen and screenshares. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of respondents indicated that their top security concern is the circumvention of email and sharing of confidential information through screenshares or webcams.
- Video and chat usage have surged, increasing more than 70% and 50%, respectively, since Theta Lake’s 2020 Benchmark Report.
“Data and experience show that employees, partners, and customers want to collaborate, communicate, and share information on Webex while their organizations require integrated security and compliance capabilities to safely meet this demand,” said Abhay Kulkarni, Vice President and General Manager of Webex Meetings at Cisco.
