Rethinking communications surveillance in banking for 2026
Key takeaways
- Rethinking communications surveillance in banking for 2026 Douglas Blakey Tue, June 2, 2026 at 7:44 PM GMT+7 5 min read.
- The numbers tell a clear story.
- Generative AI tools are now embedded deeply enough in day-to-day financial and business workflows that firms are scrambling to archive and supervise their outputs.
Rethinking communications surveillance in banking for 2026 Douglas Blakey Tue, June 2, 2026 at 7:44 PM GMT+7 5 min read. The way people communicate at work has changed beyond recognition in the past decade. The channels employees use day-to-day - Whats App, Microsoft Teams, generative AI tools - bear little resemblance to the systems compliance frameworks were originally built around. For banks, the gap between how people actually communicate and what surveillance infrastructure was designed to capture is becoming wider, especially with new communications channels emerging at pace and changing how we work and interact.
The numbers tell a clear story. Global Relay s Data Insights: Communications Capture Trends 2025/26 Report, which draws on data from more than 12,000 financial institutions, found that Microsoft Teams is now the third most captured communications channel across financial services.
Email remains dominant at 89% of firms - no surprise - but the more revealing shifts are happening around it. WhatsApp capture rose 36% year-on-year, driven largely by continued regulatory pressure in the US, including a run of FINRA enforcements against individuals over off-channel communications. Apple Messages capture surged 114%, perhaps explained by firms looking to find a “WhatsApp alternative”. And capture of ChatGPT - a channel that barely registered on compliance radars two years ago - increased by nearly 3,000%.