Shiran is the CEO & Co-Founder at Shield, a workplace intelligence company focused on communications compliance in financial services.
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Emojis seem so innocent. Those little faces have become interwoven as part of the global lexicon since emoticons made their debut in 1982. Regardless of culture or geographical location, “speaking emoji” has become as commonplace as texting. Today, there are over 3,300 emojis represented in the standard Unicode. There’s even a dedicated “Emojipedia” site. And Oxford Dictionaries named “emoji” as the 2015 Word of the Year.
That sounds exciting if you like to text with visual expressions. However, for those who are trying to monitor and uphold compliance, it’s no laughing matter. “Emoji speak” is exacerbating the complexity of compliance monitoring, which is already an exceptionally challenging field.
Emojis mean different things across cultures and generations. This suggests that emoji speak has multiple dialects. Incorporating visual expression into e-comms as a means of obfuscating intent, such as to commit market fraud, amplifies the complexity of monitoring. Recent research suggests that incorporating an emoji into an abusive (or non-compliant) online post masks the malintent and is more likely to escape detection. After the Euro 2020 Final when several players on the England team were bombarded with racist social media posts, Instagram accounts that posted racist emojis were over three times less likely to be shut down.
Going forward requires enabling the future workplace. Across the industry, there is seemingly a shared vision for “good-bye risk and hello reality,” at least by those who embrace workplace intelligence. Clarity is desperately needed regarding e-communications among employees and between brokers and their clients.
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Within the industry, accepting this risk has become the norm given the complexity of monitoring e-comms, now exacerbated by the challenges of monitoring emoji speak. The sheer volume of e-comms messages coupled with the siloed nature of those data have forced many financial firms to simply surrender to the risk. However, heightened regulatory pressure, the now-mainstream standard of remote work environments and the proliferation of e-comms channels are forcing companies to take a more proactive approach to monitoring emojis.
In a world where 92% of the digital population incorporates emojis and there are over 2 trillion mobile messages each year, the ambiguity of these little symbols introduces a vagueness that the legal and RegTech worlds are unaccustomed to dealing with. Different devices render the emoji differently: Did the sender intend to signal non-compliant behavior, or was the recipient simply the unintended receiver of a message that was misconstrued because of how their device rendered it?
That’s a slippery slope for the courts. The American Bar Association warns that litigators should be aware that informal non-textual e-comms can be damaging to their clients as well as complicated for jurors and judges to navigate. Lawyers need to be mindful of how they present emojis as evidence as these visual emoticons are highly subjective and open to wide interpretation. Until workplace intelligence becomes established as both a technology and a practice, financial firms — and compliance officers specifically — may be unable to convincingly demonstrate non-compliant behavior.
Probing into a company’s internal communications can unveil answers to the toughest questions. More specifically, doing so can reveal the intent to commit market fraud. Here, workplace intelligence puts the spotlight on risk and helps reduces it to a manageable level. Going forward, it’s all about the future of work and enabling the future workplace. As Covid-19 has shown, work is no longer restricted by formerly conventional boundaries.
Neither is dialogue. Today, people communicate with each other in a multitude of ways, across dozens of e-comms platforms and using hundreds of dialects, including emojis. Workplace intelligence, as a field, is in its infancy. The next frontier is going beyond monitoring emojis to predicting non-compliance.
The challenges of monitoring emojis for non-compliance are well-known: How to do it is evolving but not rapidly enough to keep up with the business imperative. Pretending that your staff is going to follow a verbal directive to stop using emojis is wishful thinking. Consider the following advice instead:
• Embrace a proactive approach to workplace intelligence: If you don’t take steps now, you’ll be in a reactive mode and struggle to manage non-compliance events.
• Craft crystal clear policies on the use of emojis in business transactions and correspondence.
• Limit the use of emojis by explicitly stating which emojis — if any — can be used and how they are to be used.
• Mandate access and restrict usage of unapproved personal electronic devices and specific e-comms apps to manage the challenge of having message data scattered across the organization.
• Routinely update policies and formally roll out (via training) updates to the organization.
• Rigorously enforce policies with clear consequences that are shared widely to the organization for all to see.
• Update your technology monitoring algorithm so that all emojis and all correspondence with emojis are flagged.
• Task your compliance team with reviewing each of those flagged messages; this approach burdens personnel but reduces the firm’s risk.
• Actively participate in compliance forums and events such as the European Compliance and Ethics Conference to learn the best practices of other firms and RegTech vendors.
• Investigate off-the-shelf solutions and request pilot implementations to test their effectiveness.
The new paradigm of emoji compliance requires a contextual understanding to prosecute bad actors. Are you ready?
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Shiran is the CEO & Co-Founder at Shield, a workplace intelligence company focused on communications compliance in financial services. Read Shiran Weitzman's full
Shiran is the CEO & Co-Founder at Shield, a workplace intelligence company focused on communications compliance in financial services. Read Shiran Weitzman's full executive profile here.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesfinancecouncil/2021/10/05/an-e-comms-evolution-compliance-now-has-to-speak-emoji/" width="100%" height="800" frameborder="0">
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