Case Study: FaceTime/Wachovia
Enterprise IM company:
FaceTime Communications
Name of client company:
Wachovia Securities
Client’s problem:
Giving customers what they want is the most basic rule of business. But for Wachovia Securities, giving its customers what they wanted posted a problem.
An increasing number of Wachovia Securities clients wanted to communicate via instant messaging (IM). That posed a problem for Wachovia, because public IM networks like those offered by AOL, MSN and Yahoo are difficult to manage and control. Also, government regulations mandate that financial services companies like Wachovia Securities supervise and record all correspondence — including electronic correspondence — between employees and clients.
Wachovia Securities needed to use the public IM networks to communicate with its clients, and at the same time comply with both regulatory guidelines and its own business policies. At first, the company implemented some stop-gap measures, like printing out IM logs each time a trader completed an IM session with a customer. Wachovia quickly realized it needed IM auditing software that also provided cross-network compatibility.
Solution:
FaceTime IM Auditor
How it works:
Not only did FaceTime’s IM Auditor offer IM network independence, it has a strategic partnership with Assentor, the monitoring solution Wachovia already uses for e-mail communications. Using Assentor’s e-mail monitoring solution, Wachovia Securities captures and scans every e-mail communication for key words or phrases that can have compliance or regulatory issues. FaceTime IM Auditor extends this same capability to public IM network communications.
IM Auditor also offers features like IM compliance supervision, IM access control, IM identity management and IM export capabilities. It does not change the end-user experience in any way. IT staff simply install a back-end software server behind the corporate firewall to manage and monitor instant messaging across any IM network.
Wachovia Securities Director of Dedicated Infrastructure Support Sid Vyas said IM Auditor was a “piece of cake to install and set up,” as it is very straightforward to put into any production environment.
Results:
Almost one-third of Wachovia Securities employees have expressed an interest in using IM. At the same time, Wachovia’s customers use IM as their primary form of communications with the securities firm. Wachovia says it is confident that IM Auditor can scale to accommodate the anticipated growth.
Bob Woods is the managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.
Reprinted from InstantMessagingPlanet.