Regulated organisations once ran compliance across five to 10 communication channels and e-mail plus recorded voice covered almost everything a regulator was likely to ask for. That number now sits somewhere between 50 and 100.
Employees across financial services, healthcare, legal and insurance work through Microsoft Teams, Slack and Zoom, move to WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram when it suits the conversation and have started putting work through generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms such as Claude Enterprise.
“A channel nobody is capturing is not a gap in a report, it is a regulatory violation waiting to be found,” says Matt Balcomb, Sales Director SA at Smarsh. “The organisations carrying the most exposure today are usually the ones still running a capture strategy designed for the tools they had 10 years ago.”
Restricting those tools tends to push the work somewhere less visible instead of stopping it. The alternative most compliance teams settle on is a system for each problem, which is how a regulated firm ends up running between five and 15 capture products at once.
One handles e-mail, another records calls, a third covers Teams and Slack, a fourth governs WhatsApp and a fifth archives social. Each carries its own retention logic, search behaviour and audit trail, so a single investigation means assembling a picture from different sources that were never designed to interoperate.
“Fragmentation is itself a risk vector, because compliance failures very seldom come from a channel that was monitored badly,” Balcomb explains. “They almost always come from one that fell between two vendors.”
A complete record
Under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and market rules such as MiFID II and SEC Rule 17a-4, the obligation is to hold a complete and defensible record of a conversation rather than a partial one.
Employees hold a different identity in every system they touch, which means a search on a name returns a fraction of what that person said unless those identities are mapped to one another. Smarsh Capture connects them, so a supervisory review or a regulatory request returns everything an individual communicated across every channel rather than the two or three that happened to be searched.
Capture that strips a conversation back to plain text makes a poor foundation for any of that. Threads, edits, reactions, deletions, attachments, images and voice notes carry much of the meaning in modern messaging.
“The value of a record sits in its completeness and a reviewer who can see who joined a thread, what was edited and what was removed is in a position to make a judgement that a stripped-down text log will never support,” adds Balcomb.
`Litigation teams and analytics tools depend on the same thing, which is a conversation preserved as it happened rather than a summary of it.
Beyond the archive
Once communications data is captured cleanly at the point of ingestion, its usefulness stops being confined to compliance. The same governed dataset feeds customer operations teams working on journey and quality analysis, product and strategy teams tracking voice-of-customer signals and data and AI teams that need structured, permissioned material rather than an unmanaged export.
“Governance applied at ingestion is what makes communications data usable later, because a dataset captured properly can go to an analytics or AI team without anyone having to question how it was collected,” says Balcomb.
Smarsh Capture routes that data into an archive, a data lake or an AI environment without a separate capture project for each destination.
New channels arrive faster than procurement cycles, which is the practical argument for treating capture as an infrastructure layer rather than a set of purchases. Smarsh supports more than 100 channels through one platform and builds custom connectors through application programming interfaces (APIs) where an organisation runs something proprietary, with Claude Enterprise and Singtel among the most recent additions.
“Compliance teams should not be the reason an organisation cannot adopt a new communication tool,” ends Balcomb. “When capture is built as a layer rather than a product, saying yes to something new becomes a configuration question instead of a 12-month procurement exercise.”
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