Compliance Doesn't Stop at MS Teams: Centralize All Voice Data

Compliance call recording on Microsoft Teams cannot rely on Teams’ native features, especially for regulated organizations. Plus, Teams is only one channel. Regulators expect a complete view across your entire communication estate, which means getting every channel into one centralized place, not just recording Teams.

Regulators including the FCA, SEC, and OCR have raised their expectations when it comes to data completeness. Under MiFID II, SEC Rule 17a-4, and HIPAA, the expectation has shifted to the quality and integrity of data, meaning organizations need to demonstrate not just that a communication was captured, but that the data is complete and unaltered. Organizations need to have tangible proof that this is the case. Communication compliance should be a zero-trust exercise.

Teams recording alone is unlikely to be sufficient to consistently demonstrate these requirements and achieve complete Microsoft Teams archiving and compliance – let alone compliance across your other channels.

Most regulated organizations do not communicate exclusively on Teams. External calls happen on Webex. Trading floors use turrets. Public switched telephone networks carry communications with parties outside enterprise platforms. Increasingly, organizations are using the likes of WhatsApp and WeChat to communicate for business. Each of these channels generates data that falls within a regulatory scope.

Without unified validation, organizations end up with capture across multiple channels, without a consistent way to verify completeness, normalize metadata, or demonstrate integrity. A regulator asking for a full picture of communications related to a specific transaction or incident may expect an answer that spans all of them, validated to the same standard.

Capturing every channel only helps if that data lands in one place. When recordings and messages stay in separate tools, each with its own format and its own gaps, there is no reliable way to prove that nothing is missing. Centralization is the foundation, which requires consolidating communications from every source into one repository in a consistent format, so the whole estate can be monitored as one.

That's how Custodia operates. We consolidate regulated communications into a single data lake, eliminating silos and normalizing formats, including across legacy and off channel platforms, such as Teams, Webex, trading turrets, PSTN, and messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat. Only once that foundation is in place does reconciliation become possible. This is the process that confirms what was captured matches what should have been captured. Centralization puts everything in one place; reconciliation proves it is complete.

Data capture services allow you to prove a recording exists. Data capture with reconciliation means you can prove what that recording contains, when it was created, that it has not been altered since, and that nothing is missing. Reconciliation is a cornerstone of communication compliance for regulated industries, as compliance recording is just the first step.

SEC Rule 17a-4 requires broker-dealers to preserve electronic records either in a non-rewriteable, non-erasable (WORM) format or using systems with tamper-evident audit trails that allow records to be reconstructed.

MiFID II requires firms to record and retain relevant communications across channels (including phone conversations and electronic messaging) in a durable, tamper-resistant medium, so regulators can reconstruct activities and verify that records are complete and accurate.

HIPAA requires covered entities to implement audit and integrity controls to safeguard electronic protected health information (ePHI), including tracking access and modifications. The integrity standard states that regulated healthcare organizations must “implement policies and procedures to protect electronic protected health information from improper alteration or destruction”.

Turning on recording in Teams only addresses part of these communication compliance requirements. In practice, many organizations implement additional validation and audit controls to help prove to regulators that records are complete, accurate, and unaltered.

Without data validation, organizations typically face three specific problems when a regulatory request arrives across these channels.

The first is incomplete metadata. For example, Teams recordings exist as files, but without consistent metadata capture, the records may lack:

• Timestamp verification
• Participant identification
• Session data

Without reliable metadata, it can be difficult to demonstrate that a record is complete to regulators.

The second is no reconciliation. Without an active process that checks whether what was captured matches what should have been captured, organizations cannot confirm completeness or identify data gaps before they become compliance violations. They can assert it, but they cannot demonstrate it. This means if a regulator asks for evidence, your business may be left scrambling to find convincing proof.

The third is the inability to demonstrate that a record has been maintained, without being tampered with, from the point of capture through to retrieval. This is an explicit requirement under SEC Rule 17a-4 and a widely recognized regulatory expectation across FCA and MiFID II environments, where firms must ensure records remain complete, accurate, and unaltered.