Is social media compliance becoming predictable and thus easier to manage, which would make compliance staff happy? Or are there more adventures to come? This key issue emerged during a panel discussion on what is next for social media compliance. The panel was part of FTF’s Social Media and Compliance (SMAC) conference last week.
The predictability issue reflects a growing opinion about social media compliance. When asked about social media compliance for another story, Donald Runkle, the former chief compliance officer for Raymond James Financial Services (RJFS), says that once the right behavioral and IT controls are in place, social media compliance is by definition uneventful.
In addition, when compliance teams and technology are in place, social media compliance can still be a little frustrating for firms, says Runkle, who earlier this year left his post to join law firm Edgerton & Weaver, where he is the director of consulting services. Staying on top of social media interactions may cost firms more than they expect.
“I think unfortunately it’s very resource-consuming in terms of the time, the money and the systems that you need to capture and review social media,” Runkle says. “The reality is the whole time that we were doing it … I don’t recall one issue [at RJFS] we uncovered of any significance through our social media monitoring, which I guess could partly be cause and effect.”
Yet the next chapter of compliance is likely to have many interesting areas of data surveillance, say the SMAC panelists. Some of the areas to watch are:
- The mix of mobile computing and social media in terms of ads and other interactions will become a greater compliance concern because of the complex sets of data that will be transmitted to clients and potential clients, and the data that is retrieved from them. Yet the mobile-social media link cannot be ignored as end-users want more mobile links to social media sites and they will get them.
- Firms will have to find ways to optimize the data from social media interactions, which is being gathered and archived by financial services firms. Inevitably, firms will have to apply business intelligence strategies to archived data and current data flows to not only refine compliance but to advance sales and marketing efforts. Most of this data has implications and correlations related to customer relationship management and know your customer (KYC) efforts.
- For those financial services firms that use social media for business-to-business interactions, there will a variety of data interactions, including lot of unstructured data such as text, e-mail messages, documents, video, photos, audio files, presentations, and web pages. The archiving and retrieval of that kind of data shared via social media has to be a major headache for many firms.
- As social media and other forms of technology progress, data will also be gathered from cutting-edge inventions such as the recorded activity of those using devices such as Google Glass, smartwatches and other wearable devices. Social media interactions facilitated by these devices have to be recorded because they could prove useful for firms trying to stay on top of where their customers are headed and/or wearing. Sorting out the workflow to monitor social media activity via wearables will be an interesting challenge.
While it is useful to underscore the costs of social media compliance, those costs may soon be justified given some of the data surveillance challenges ahead.
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