UK financial groups are failing to adequately invest in archiving technology to keep track of corporate social media activity, a new report has claimed.
The research, conducted among its client base of 20,000 financial firms in the UK and US, found that UK firms are significantly behind those at US-based financial groups, when it comes to keeping records from a variety of sources including social media, instant messaging and mobile communications.
Ken Anderson, vice president of marketing at Smarsh, says that in the US, both the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the Securities and Exchange Commission are making increasing numbers of requests to regulated firms to produce evidence of e-communications and requests are growing more sophisticated.
He added: "It is little wonder really that US firms are most concerned with increased scrutiny from regulators.
"UK firms on the other hand, have not seen as much regulatory attention given to e-communications compliance nor the examples of firms being punished or sanctioned for non-compliance."
The report from Smarsh suggests there is no means of record keeping or record monitoring for social media output at 58% amongst UK financial firms compared with an average of 34% for US based firms.
Researchers at Smarsh also concluded that the gap in mobile text messaging and instant messaging channels at UK firms could cause problems in the future.
It stated that UK firms allow use of these types of messages more often than US firms for business purposes and yet UK firms have a low number of archiving/supervision systems in place for instant messaging.
Figures show a lack of recording, archiving and monitoring for instant messaging at 39% of firms in the UK, compared to 22% in the US and for mobile text messaging there is a gap of 58% compared to 64% in the US. Furthermore, only 39% of UK firms are concerned about cyber security threats.
The company did not disclose the exact sample size for the poll at the time of writing.