The compliance reality in 2025
Regulatory expectations are rising on two fronts:
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Operational resilience and audit speed.
In the EU, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) sets harmonised resilience obligations across 20+ financial entity types and their ICT providers. In the UK, FCA operational resilience rules require firms to operate important business services within impact tolerances.
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Complete, provable recordkeeping.
US regulators continue to penalise off-channel communications and recordkeeping failures: 12 firms paid $63m in fines in January 2025; with a new tranche from the CFTC enforcement sprint of $8.3M a few months ago – cumulative penalties since 2021 now exceed $2bn.
If your WhatsApp policy is “just don’t get caught”, that’s probably not going to cut it anymore.
Against this backdrop, channel sprawl, legacy recorders and siloed data archives make it hard to prove completeness, authenticity and policy control.
The Wordwatch answer: clarity, control and confidence
Wordwatch is a unified communications governance and archiving platform for regulated organisations. With Wordwatch Archive at its core–and buildable capabilities to capture, govern and reconcile data – it gives Compliance, Surveillance and IT teams one place to control, protect and manage voice and digital communications with evidentiary integrity. It’s modular, open, and designed for speed.
Why this matters now
- Evergreen Compliance: Always current with evolving regulations – and no forced migrations.
- Automated chain of custody / proof of capture: Assurance and audit readiness are baked in, not bolted on.
- Single pane for IT and Compliance: One interface, shared oversight, faster decisions.
- Infrastructure freedom & zero lock-in: Open APIs, original formats preserved (even encrypted), cloud/on premise/hybrid.
Outcome: replace fragmented data silos and manual checks with a governed, easily accessible archive and real-time assurance—so response to audits and investigations take minutes, not weeks.
Platform design principles
- Modular control: Start with Wordwatch Archive; add Wordwatch Capture, Wordwatch Assure, Wordwatch Govern as needed – no re-platforming.
- Open by design: API first interoperability with existing recorders, eDiscovery, surveillance, SIEM/ITSM and analytics. Maximising the value of communications for decision making, by unlocking data and ensuring it is accurate and authentic.
- Clarity & speed at scale: Rapid search, playback and export across even billions of records with enriched metadata.
- Realtime visibility: Assurance dashboards show ingestion health, retention posture and flags exceptions before audits do.
The compliance foundation: Wordwatch Archive
What it is: A secure, futureproof, compliance archive for all regulated voice and digital communications—past, present and future—preserving originals and metadata to maintain legal integrity.
What it does:
- Preserves original formats with full metadata and chain of custody.
- Indexes at scale for rapid search, playback and export.
- Applies retention, legal holds and defensible deletion.
- Deploys anywhere: cloud, on-premise or hybrid.
Why it matters: Replace risky data silos with a single source of truth that accelerates regulator responses, DSARs and litigation support, while eliminating future metadata migrations. Finally retire that ageing voice recorder that still runs on Windows XP!
Capture without compromise: Wordwatch Capture
What it is: Multi-channel, real-time recording and ingest across voice, video, chat and messaging—bringing existing recorders under one umbrella or providing native capture where needed.
What it does:
- Records or ingests dealer board, Teams/Zoom, mobile voice, WhatsApp and more.
- Normalises and enriches records, unifies identities across systems, and delivers straight into Wordwatch Archive.
Why it matters: Ensure mandated coverage, eliminate off-channel risk and blind spots, and reduce investigation time with complete timelines tied to individuals.
Policy to practice: Wordwatch Govern
What it is: Full lifecycle governance and investigation across channels, jurisdictions and teams- directly on top of Archive.
What it does:
- Automates retention, deletion, access control and legal holds—jurisdiction aware.
- Provides casework, lineage and exportable evidence grade packages.
- Adds AI-powered review, speech-to-text, translation, and summarisation to speed investigations.
Why it matters: Turn written policy into automated, auditable action. Prevent over retention, reduce insider risk and respond faster to audits, DSARs or litigation.
Compliance that proves itself: Wordwatch Assure
What it is: Continuous validation that what should be captured is captured—and safely in Archive.
What it does:
- Automated CDR reconciliation and “walk the floor” checks.
- Detects missing, duplicate or corrupted files; triggers alerts and escalations.
- Integrates with service desks and monitoring dashboards.
Why it matters: Realtime assurance reduces manual effort and flags issues long before auditors or regulators do—critical as regulators intensify scrutiny of recordkeeping controls. Explaining “we thought it was working” has never been a winning audit strategy.
What makes Wordwatch different
- Proof-of-capture & chain of custody built-in—hashing and lineage from ingest to deletion for legal defensibility.
- Total data freedom—open formats and APIs, no black box lock in or punitive exit fees.
- Unified view for IT & Compliance—shared interface and logic; faster decisions, fewer shadow processes.
- Compliance on your terms—cloud, on-premise or hybrid with data sovereignty control.
- Transparent, predictable pricing—no surprise line items for export or discovery access.
How Wordwatch maps to today’s regulatory priorities
- Operational resilience & DORA compliance: A single, governed platform with auditable lineage and API level integrations supports ICT risk, incident and third-party oversight obligations, and accelerates evidence quality retrieval.
- Recordkeeping and off-channel control: Multichannel capture plus Wordwatch Assure’s proof-of-capture directly address persistent regulatory findings on unmonitored messaging. SEC underscore the need to prove completeness and retention controls.
- UK operational resilience deadline: Centralised, policy driven governance helps firms demonstrate they can run important services within impact tolerances.
Who benefits
- Compliance & Surveillance: Proactive assurance, fast search and AI-enabled review reduce manual effort and false starts.
- IT, Infrastructure & Voice: Retire ageing recorders, keep data mobile and controllable, and avoid costly re-ingests.
- Legal & Risk: Evidence-grade retrieval, lineage and defensible deletion improve litigation posture and DSAR response.
Implementation without disruption
Bring your own recorder—or use our connectors and native capture—then unify everything in Wordwatch Archive. Deploy cloud, on-prem or hybrid; integrate via open APIs with surveillance, SIEM/ITSM, eDiscovery and analytics. No forced migrations, no vendor lock in.
- One platform for capture, archiving, assurance and governance.
- Faster audits with built in chain-of-custody and real-time assurance.
- Infrastructure freedom and open APIs—no lock in.
- Designed for simplicity for Compliance, Surveillance and IT.
Here at Wordwatch we believe the platform we have created provides long term assurance and simplifies the world of Compliance Communication for both Compliance and Technical roles.
Ready to replace risk with clarity?
See how the Wordwatch Compliance Platform helps you meet today’s regulatory demands while unlocking the value of your communications data.
