How a Regulated Financial Firm Cut Compliance Reporting Time by 71%
71% less time spent on compliance reporting
About this case study: results are from a real Salamtalk deployment. The customer’s name is a pseudonym and their logo is withheld under a confidentiality agreement. The metrics below are reported as measured.
The situation
Apex Capital Group is a regulated financial services firm whose client-facing staff are required to record certain categories of calls and retain them for a defined period. Before moving to Salamtalk, recordings were spread across three generations of recording hardware, inherited from past mergers.
The practical consequences were showing up every time an audit or a client dispute required evidence:
- Recordings were scattered across systems. Pulling a single client’s call history meant checking three separate archives.
- Access wasn’t consistently controlled. Playback permissions had been set up ad hoc over the years, and no one could produce a clean list of who could access which recordings.
- Export for auditors was manual. Compliance staff were exporting files individually and assembling them into audit packages by hand.
What they needed
Apex’s compliance team set out requirements rather than preferences: a defined retention window applied consistently across all recorded lines, access controls that could be reviewed and justified, encryption of recordings both at rest and in transit, and a straightforward export process for regulators and internal audit.
Apex was clear throughout the engagement, and remained clear afterward, that Salamtalk’s role is to provide the recording, retention, and access infrastructure — the firm itself remains responsible for meeting its own regulatory obligations, including which calls must be recorded and for how long.
What we deployed
| Requirement | Implementation |
|---|---|
| Recording scope | All designated client-facing lines recorded automatically |
| Retention | Defined retention window applied uniformly, configured to Apex’s policy |
| Access control | Role-based playback permissions, reviewed and assigned by compliance admins |
| Encryption | TLS 1.3 in transit, encrypted storage at rest |
| Audit export | Structured export of recordings and metadata for auditor review |
| Security posture | SOC 2 Type II-aligned platform controls |
Playback access was restricted to named compliance and supervisory roles rather than left open to all managers, and every playback event is logged. Recordings exported for an audit carry the associated call metadata — date, time, line, and participants — rather than being handed over as raw audio files alone.
How the deployment ran
- Compliance team defined the retention period and recording scope per line category, based on Apex’s own regulatory requirements.
- Access roles were drafted, reviewed by compliance and IT security jointly, then assigned.
- Recording was enabled on a subset of lines first, with compliance staff checking that retrieval and playback worked as expected.
- Full rollout across all designated client-facing lines followed once the pilot lines were confirmed.
- A dry-run audit export was produced and reviewed internally before the first live regulatory request was handled on the new system.
The dry run surfaced a mismatch between how Apex’s auditors expected metadata formatted and the default export layout, which was corrected before any real audit depended on it.
The results
- 71% less time spent on compliance reporting, measured from audit request to completed export package
- Recordings consolidated from three legacy archives into one system with one access model
- Playback access restricted to named, logged roles rather than informal manager access
- Encryption at rest and in transit applied consistently across all recorded lines
The time saving came mostly from no longer having to locate and reconcile recordings across separate archives. Compliance staff could search and export from a single system rather than running the same request three times.
What was harder than expected
Agreeing the retention policy took longer than building the system. Different parts of Apex’s business had, over time, applied slightly different informal retention practices, and reconciling these into a single documented policy required input from legal, compliance, and IT before any configuration work began. The technical implementation of the agreed policy was comparatively quick.
Not every access request could be automated. A small number of recordings needed manual legal hold, outside the standard retention window, for calls connected to open disputes. This had to be handled as a separate manual flag rather than folded into the automated retention schedule, since the standard policy would otherwise have deleted them on schedule.
Apex’s compliance lead noted that the firm, not Salamtalk, carries ongoing responsibility for setting and reviewing the retention policy correctly — the platform enforces whatever policy it is given, so getting that policy right up front mattered more than any feature of the system itself.
Next steps: see security for the platform’s encryption and access-control model, contact centers for recording in high-volume environments, or talk to our team about a compliance deployment.