Mobile call recording for compliance is a second, business phone number on an employee's own mobile phone, on which every call and message is recorded and kept for the regulator. Calls on the employee's personal number are not recorded. The product is sometimes called a compliant second line.
In many countries, regulators require banks, brokers and wealth firms to record and keep their staff's business calls and messages with clients. In India, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), the regulator of the securities markets, requires stockbrokers to record the orders that clients give by phone. Office desk phones are easy to record, because their calls pass through the firm's own phone system. But many staff now call clients from their own mobile phones, often while travelling. A firm cannot record a personal phone completely, and it should not record calls to the employee's family. Giving every employee a second, company-owned phone is costly, and people carry only one phone.
The second line solves this. It is an app on the phone, linked to a new business number. The app carries calls as data over the internet, using voice over IP (VoIP), or through the mobile operator's own network. Either way, each business call passes through the provider's system, which records it. Text and chat messages on the business number are captured too. The recordings go to the firm's communications archive.
Consider a relationship manager at a wealth management firm in Bengaluru. She advises 120 families on their investments. On a Saturday, a client calls her business number and asks her to sell ₹15 lakh of a mutual fund. The call lasts 6 minutes. The app records it and uploads the recording, tagged with her name, the client's number and the time. The same evening, her brother calls her personal number. That call is not recorded. On Monday, the client says that he never gave the instruction. The compliance team finds the Saturday call in the archive in two minutes and plays it. The instruction is clear, and the dispute ends.
The firm sets the rules centrally. For instance, it can block business messages on chat apps that cannot be archived, so that client conversations stay on the recorded line. When the employee leaves the firm, the firm removes the business number from her phone. The clients keep calling the same number, which now reaches her successor.
The business number can also be connected to the firm's cloud phone system. Then a client who calls the office can be forwarded to her mobile, and the call is still recorded. The archive's checks for misconduct then cover these calls as well, just as they cover email arriving through the secure email gateway.