Making audio recordings of transactions

As of December 21, 2013, all companies that trade in financial instruments, whether these are futures, commodities or forex, are required to make and maintain audio records of every communication regarding transactions involving them, per Rule 1.35(a) of the U. S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The records are to be kept for a year after the date on which they occurred "in a form and manner identifiable and searchable by transaction." Telephone messages, emails and instant messages are all covered by this rule.

Such recording can be expensive. As a result many firms are prohibiting the use of mobile phones so that there will be nothing to record. There are also those firms that have taken a much more lenient approach, allowing the use of smartphones while requiring all conversations that are relevant to the ongoing transactions be conducted on conference lines on which everything is recorded and onto which both the buyers and the sellers must dial independently. In any event no system of enforcement has as yet been put into effect nor are experts in the field in agreement as to when and how compliance checks will be conducted.

There are four basic options for making mobile recordings:

Recording calls directly to the phone via a software program that has been downloaded thereto.

Routing the call to a server that does the recording: This method is rarely used today because the call may be put on hold and the conversation consequently delayed.

Using the network itself: This is the most popular method and capture-everything networks have been set up specially for the purpose.

Carrying calls to a server via "soft phones" that use VoIP

The audio, having been captured, is stored in one of two places: in the record-keeping server infrastructure of an organization or a vendor's cloud system. If the latter option is chosen then a secure application programming interface (API) is used to make it available. Transcribing the audio to text is the best way to analyze it. Transcription is not really as easy with conversations among traders as it is with, say, banks, where the call center operators are trained to speak slowly and to articulate precisely. This, however, should not be a problem as long as one gets the semantics right.

Appsee: a new tool for mobile traders

There are many other ways in which the evolution of technology and investment have gone hand in hand with one another. A new "in-app" mobile Trading Center app called Appsee has been founded by a trio of financial officers: Zahi Boussiba, Yoni Douek and TechFinancials ex-Sales Director Alix Hecht. Ms. Hecht explains that owing to the critical nature of application response time for the engagement and retention of customers in the forex industry, she and her partners created this platform that will enable the forex company to put itself into the shoes of the customer as nothing that came before it has ever done so. They will be able to understand the ways in which customers interact with the app and thus figure out how to optimize their applications. The reason why this type of development is so crucial is that if the response time is too slow customers will simply take their business elsewhere. Most of them will never engage in Mobile Trading with that particular company again.

One of the first entities to adopt AppSee is eToro, a British-based social investment company whose users can follow and copy each other's financial activity. EToro is using Appsee to improve its iOS applications and understand the crashes that take place thereon, according to their Head of Mobile officer Shimon Koifman. ZuluTrade CEO Leon Yohai, who is a true expert in social trading (the process whereby online investors rely on financial content gathered by users and collected from Web 2.0 applications for most of the information that they need to make their financial decisions. Forex businesses place a great deal of emphasis on this), said that he believes mobile trading to be one of more important developments in the evolution of the ForEx industry.

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