Why Trend Detection Is Becoming Compliance's Biggest Advantage

With smartphones now essential workplace tools, companies in the strictly regulated financial industry are obligated to monitor, record, and store every communication by their teams and traders on these devices.

For the compliance investigators that monitor these recordings, an ideal scenario involves a single suspect operating entirely alone, with a smoking gun in the form of a recorded message outlining the intent and manner of the transgression.

A quick look at recent high-profile regulatory breaches in the finance industry tells a different story. When a compliance breach occurs, it’s rarely down to a single incident: breaches originating from within the organization are typically highly complex, comprising multiple communications that only make sense when collated and in context. Sometimes, they’re entirely unintentional. Other times, they’re down to institutional failings, with multiple stakeholders and errors across multiple departments.

In 2025, Postbank, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank, received a €23 million fine after regulators discovered multiple compliance breaches, including that its phone and mobile recording services used “for identifying and recovering recordings of trader telephone calls” failed to meet legal standards.

The story made headlines for two reasons – the size of the fine, and the deep-lying nature of the offence. The breach was not down to a single malicious actor, or individual human error, but the entire mobile recording practices of one of the world’s largest banks.

Standard compliance methods are falling behind

Communications compliance has historically been built around investigating individual incidents after they occur. Whether responding to an alert, complaint, or regulatory request, teams spend much of their time reviewing historical communications to understand what happened. Any detection depends on predefined rules and searching for familiar keywords and suspicious terms. As communications volumes continue to grow, this reactive model becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

This leads to a tension between traditional investigative methods and modern demand for constant mobile communications between employees, traders, and external partners.

The Columbia Law Review states that process-based reforms – or “the actions, practices, and routines firms employ to communicate and analyze information” – are key to tackling complex compliance investigations. Pivoting from individual investigations to proactive detection, based on new data analysis methods, is one such option.

The key is turning from a reactive, incident-based approach to an at-scale strategy that detects patterns and avoids issues before they occur. Advances in recording, AI, and data-analysis technologies allow companies to parse through mountains of data to detect complex patterns and identify potential abuses before they can come into effect.

Risk rarely appears in isolation

Most conduct issues don't emerge from a single phone call or message. They either develop gradually through recurring behaviors, changes in communication patterns, repeated policy breaches, or subtle shifts in employee interactions; or they’re a result of ineffective training methods, guidelines, and internal communications.

The 2025 Postbank incident was a direct result of the company failing to instil correct recording practices. The real opportunity lies in identifying these trends before they develop into larger operational or regulatory issues.

Cross-departmental conduct risk monitoring

A wider compliance scope like this also increases the accuracy of detection – traditionally, compliance methods can often result in information silos that hamper companies' ability to identify and respond to institutional failings. As Deloitte points out, modern compliance is no longer the sole purview of a single compliance department: “other chief experience officer (CXO) roles have critical parts to play in the planning and implementation for regulatory compliance.”

As regulation extends into other departments and industries, it becomes clear that a reactive, investigative approach is ill-suited to anticipating the nebulous demands of the contemporary financial industry. Again, a forward-thinking model based on prediction and recognition can help companies bridge the gap between separate departments and gain a clearer picture of their company's mobile and telecommunications usage.

We’ve previously explored how the changing face of business communication is affecting compliance. Employees now communicate across a wider range of platforms, including informal instant-messaging services and consumer products like WhatsApp. These new formats, in turn, alter the tone and content of business communications, with informal messaging and emojis becoming commonplace.

An international trading environment makes this need even more pressing, and the challenge greater. Different digital norms and channels prevail in different parts of the world. Any financial organization that operates internationally must adequately account for these in their mobile recording strategy, while also translating and transcribing in multiple languages. Achieving this in real-time, while parsing through countless messages and recorded calls, requires the adoption of new technologies.

Why trend detection changes the compliance model

The rapid adoption of LLMs and AI assistants by businesses has been met with mixed results. A recent MIT review found that 95% of businesses that have integrated AI tools have found no discernible return on their investment, while analysts are already warning about the proliferation of “workslop” - polished-seeming, substance-free work created almost entirely with AI tools. Over time, businesses are experiencing dwindling benefits from the AI and LLM products they’ve adopted.

However, most experts agree that the ability to detect patterns among vast reams of data can be a genuinely useful application of the technology, when applied correctly.

In terms of mobile recording analysis, AI tools can:

• analyze language across channels

• identify emerging themes

• detect behavioural anomalies

• recognise changes over time

• connect seemingly unrelated events

Compliance requires human judgement and expertise. When implemented carefully, AI can identify possible situations that require further investigation. A discerning usage of AI tools, coupled with the cross-departmental outlook detailed above, is a key element of an emerging field of compliance called Communications Analytics. By analyzing conversations at scale, these techniques can flag recurring issues, carry out behavioral analytics, and identify unusual activity far earlier than traditional review processes.

An at-scale, global compliance solution based on Communications Analytics principles protects revenue on two fronts: it reduces the risk of data breaches, and avoids the risk of regulatory fines. Companies with inadequate practices lose money once to malicious actors, and again to regulators.

How 1GLOBAL and Verint Communications Analytics enable earlier detection

1GLOBAL and Verint Communications Analytics provide:

• Automated transcription and multilingual topic detection: Compliance obligations can limit where businesses choose to operate – real-time, multilingual transcriptions allow companies to expand internationally while retaining stringent recording standards. Verint Communications translates from 30+ languages into English.

• Summarization: While AI tools can parse raw data, human judgement is still essential. Automated summaries greatly increase the efficiency of investigative work while ensuring that decision-making remains with the compliance experts.

• Sentiment analysis: This is where the ability to analyze vast data quantities shines: assessing intent behind communications requires contextualizing all interactions, not simply keyword or trigger phrases. Sentiment analysis provides clearer context.

Security through efficiency

Together, these features do more than reduce regulatory risk: they increase efficiency and productivity for both compliance departments and the wider company. Fewer cases are referred to legal teams, while employees are less likely to experience “false positive” breaches, requiring them to undergo investigation, potentially surrender their devices, and, in the long-term, eroding employee trust and company cohesion.

A more globalized trade environment means more business travel, which means more competing global regulatory frameworks for compliance teams to juggle. A financial firm operating in Europe and the USA, for example, must operate within the rules of the European MiFiD III as well as the American Dodd-Frank. If their work covers the stock market, they’ll also be bound by CFTC regulations.

Each of these rule sets is continually being tweaked to better capture changing digital habits and technological advances. It’s the institution's responsibility to ensure that their compliance offering is up to date. Extend this across every new country and region, and the scope of the challenge becomes clear: operating internationally while maintaining a rolodex of stratified recording practices in different countries is nearly as obsolete as the rolodex itself.

Companies cannot afford to choose between operational efficiency and data security: they require a solution that addresses both.

Turning communications into communications intelligence

Communications data should be more than an archive for regulatory purposes. Combined with analytics, transcription, and behavioral insights, it becomes a valuable source of business intelligence that helps compliance leaders understand organizational risk in real time rather than simply documenting it after the fact.

How 1GLOBAL helps firms stay ahead of the regulatory curve

As mobile usage continues to skyrocket globally, driven by increasing eSIM availability and device affordability, businesses' communication will continue to become more international. Any compliance strategy with an eye on long-term success must be based on global, multilingual capabilities. At the same time, organizations need to contend with the ballooning volumes of mobile recording data they accrued, ensuring it is securely stored while remaining accessible and searchable at short notice.

As time goes by, these archives will become exponentially harder to sift through, and potential breaches harder to spot, unless new digital tactics are adopted.

1GLOBAL communications analytics helps organizations address both of these issues by moving from reactive investigations to proactive compliance.

• Locally stored data: Many telecoms firms will route sensitive recordings and client data through servers located in other countries. With 1GLOBAL, call media is always processed locally within the customer’s regulatory jurisdiction.

• In-network recording: All recording is completely in-network, occurring at the carrier level rather than at the device or OS level. This makes mobile recording more comprehensive and minimizes the risk of user circumvention or device-related issues.

• Multi-channel oversight: Modern communications are not limited to calls and texts. A vigilant recording strategy goes beyond that to capture where communications really happen: instant messaging services, voice notes, emojis, and more.

• Searchable archives: Verint and 1GLOBAL together create fully searchable, timestamped mobile recordings that allow internal teams and regulators to instantly recall highly specific data as needed.

It’s these future-facing capabilities that make 1GLOBAL the chosen compliance solution for 8 of the world’s 10 largest banks.

Find out more about 1GLOBAL compliance solutions, or partner with 1GLOBAL by contacting our team today.