Call Accounting Featured Article

MiFID II Changes Prompt Call Accounting Reconsideration

  By Steve Anderson, Contributing Writer

The European market is well-known for being a font of change in general, but sometimes these changes can rattle even the most careful of firms in the field. Recent changes to one of Europe's biggest business laws, the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), will prompt some significant changes in business operations. This is particularly true for call accounting efforts, as noted in a report from ISI (News - Alert) Telemanagement Solutions.

MiFID is a set of regulations that primarily focuses on businesses that deal in financial services and similar instruments; stocks, bonds, proportions of collective investment and so on. This includes a wide variety of firms, including investment firms, stockbrokers, market operators, portfolio managers, and several others operating within the European Union. That includes not only operations headquartered and doing all business therein, but also those with branch offices who only do some business there.

With the arrival of January 3, 2018, there will be new changes afoot in not only MiFID—which will ultimately produce MiFID II—but also the Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (MiFIR) rules that will shake up quite a bit of how business is done. Call accounting will play an important role in this going forward.

Since there are 446 pages in the new regulations that talk about technical standards, it would be easy to get confused as to what's actually needed and what's not. Even more noteworthy is the seven pages of instructions about call recording, requiring, among other things, that “all communications that are intended to lead to a transaction” must be recorded. That's a lot of potential recording that needs to be done, and thus calls particular attention to the value of a call accounting system. Recording is a powerful tool, but without the accounting systems to keep track of what calls are made, it's just a big stack of words.

Of course, there are other requirements too—records need to be retained at least five years, firms need to regularly monitor and review communications going in and out, management needs “clear oversight” of recording operations—but all these effectively do is call attention to the need for call accounting. Call accounting goes hand in hand with call recording as the means to not only collect call recordings, but ultimately make sense of these later.

Call accounting provides the necessary means to better make sense of the calls coming in and going out, especially those ultimately recorded. With European law demanding so many changes to the way recordings are handled, having a means to make better sense of recordings is just a smart idea, and that's where call accounting shines.