In recent years, the digital revolution has transformed the banking industry. As financial services and the associated communications increasingly move online, it is more important than ever for institutions to gain control of their online presence.
As a heavily regulated industry, the financial sector is held to the highest standards of compliance. When it comes to the maintenance of records relating to online data—be this website content, or social media output—banks need to be paying close attention to their responsibilities.
In this article, we will discuss the five main reasons why website and social media archiving is such a crucial concern for the modern banking sector.
1. Meeting Industry Regulations
Financial institutions are held to some of the highest standards of compliance levelled at any industry. And with good reason—it’s vitally important to ensure that safety, trust and ethical factors are maintained within the sector. Record keeping plays a huge role here, and the data generated by websites and through social media falls squarely under this remit. The correct methods of data retention and preservation are essential.
The SEC and FINRA govern the US recordkeeping regulations. Hence, financial service organizations have to carefully preserve, capture, and moderate content from their social media platforms, websites, mobile texts, and enterprise collaboration platforms.
Similarly, the FCA for the UK and ASIC for Australia dictate that banks should maintain clear and fair communication. They must ensure all content posted or published falls within established and accepted parameters. Promotions should highlight the potential benefits and risks of investment products, etc.
Whilst a social media post may not feel like an advertisement, it will be treated as such in the eyes of regulators. To guard against false advertising challenges (including those fraudulently fabricated as the result of screenshot manipulation etc) it’s essential to have a clear record of all official content published.
Pagefreezer allows banks to collect and preserve data via automated, real-time archival. With this platform, all organizations can store, access and export website and social media content with total accuracy and contextual presentation.
2. Improving Information Governance
Recent years have seen massive evolution of information governance, growing from simple documents and record management to a more comprehensive, outcome-oriented approach. Perspectives have expanded and it’s now generally acknowledged that information governance extends far beyond compliance. It encompasses security needs, inherent information values and encourages agility, as means of changing and growing the organization.
For banks, information governance is invaluable in delivering their ocean of data to the right stakeholders, at the right time and in the right place. It’s through improved information governance that banks are able to leverage their data to the best business advantage.
Through well-ordered information governance, banks can also enjoy more instantaneous and accurate eDiscovery. This enables financial institutions to reduce business risks, increasing accuracy of stored information as the result of better archival procedures.
Information governance also contributes an economic benefit, enabling a system that requires less time for the location of specific information, minimizing risks associated with poorly managed data.
Pagefreezer offers an ideal and all-encompassing solution to help financial institutions with information governance. It helps them enjoy tools for facilitating data retention, record creation, data disposal, and record management. With flawless automation, organizations can rely on dependable and exhaustive coverage.
3. Preparing for Litigation
The increasing use of mobile text content, enterprise collaboration, social media, and website content in litigation has imposed certain protocols. In order to prepare well for litigation, it is necessary for legal teams to proactively collect, review and preserve accurate information, as it may well be demanded as evidence in the case of legal proceedings.
eDiscovery is a critical process in the early stages of litigation. Social media platforms generate vast quantities of unstructured electronically stored information, which has a major impact on the modern eDiscovery landscape.
The uncontrollable surge of data produced by social media has made it imperative for organizations to preserve, capture and review the records for which they are responsible. Because litigation is so prevalent in the banking sector, it is crucial to have real-time, contextual evidence.
With Pagefreezer, users enjoy automated archival of all edits and additions made to your online content in real time. Advanced search functionality means finding comments and conversations relating to legal matters is a quick and efficient process, and conducting large-scale and specific user or account searches across all the archives poses no problem.
The Pagefreezer dashboard allows you a defensible and original presentation of records at your fingertips and without having to incur costly intervention by eDiscovery experts.
4. Gain Marketing Insights
Marketing insights are invaluable, and advanced archiving serves as an incredible learning resource. This happens when you preserve your social media output, websites, and even the deletion, edits, and revisions.
For marketing teams, tools like Pagefreezer offer a great opportunity to gain helpful website performance insight. For instance, when they notice website conversion spiking during a particular period, they can use this tool’s dashboard to check what messaging and images were live at that time.
Having a definitive backup of all your marketing content and output presents an unbeatable advantage. It not only eases your fears of losing archived content, it gives marketing teams a tool for comparing functions and analyzing the changes your content has seen over time.
If you find the compliance department seeking records of recent changes to your website with regard to specific messaging or campaign content, you can easily provide it by seeing how your digital properties looked like on a given date. You will also be able to note the exact alterations that occurred over time, and play this out in real time to give total context to those seeking it.
5. Corporate Heritage and Institutional Memory
Banks are among the most long-lived institutions. This factor alone necessitates the preservation of their history, and one cannot underrate the important role digital history plays here. As a result of the digital age, there has been an acceleration in the amount of data and content that institutions produce.
If the banks did not arm themselves with a definitive solution for capturing this data, they would risk losing swaths of institutional memory. This is perhaps the reason behind the great emphasis on moving the bank’s internal activity and culture to the cloud.
With Pagefreezer, you no longer have to worry about hiring an archivist. Instead, you can easily capture everything in real-time with complete contextual relevance. You can preserve everything that your bank’s online presence produces, says, and shares to explore and learn for years to come.
Ready to get a handle on your website and social media archiving?
Recordkeeping has become critically important in the digital age, and it forms a large responsibility (and opportunity) for the financial industry.
Since digital interaction with the banking sector will only increase in the years to come, it is important for institutions to invest in an archiving partner like Pagefreezer. Pagefreezer will not only be your ideal solution for comprehensive coverage and compliance but will also help increase trust in the sector, preserve its history, protect it from malicious litigation and give the industry the opportunity to operate on a more efficient, transparent level.
Visit our social media and website product pages to learn more about our solutions. Or download our white paper, Why Your CMS Backups Don’t Meet Regulatory Requirements to learn more about compliant recordkeeping.
