What Is Communication Surveillance?
Communication surveillance is the monitoring and analysis of employee communications to detect potential misconduct, compliance risks and policy violations. It can cover email, chat, mobile messaging, voice and other digital channels, using methods ranging from lexicons and rules to machine learning, LLMs and behavioral analysis. In financial services, communication surveillance helps firms identify communications that may require review or investigation as part of their broader compliance and supervisory programs.
Also known as eComms surveillance, communication surveillance is particularly important in regulated industries such as financial services, where firms may need to monitor relevant business communications as part of their compliance and supervisory programs.
Communication surveillance can cover email, instant messaging, collaboration platforms, mobile messaging, voice and other digital communication channels.
Modern communication surveillance goes beyond searching messages for suspicious words. Surveillance programs can combine established methods such as communications surveillance lexicons and rules with machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), large language models (LLMs), behavioral analytics and contextual analysis to identify communications that may require further review.
The objective is to identify meaningful risk within large volumes of everyday business communications while maintaining appropriate controls, governance and oversight.
What Does Communication Surveillance Cover?
Employees communicate across multiple channels, devices, languages and platforms. The communications that a firm needs to capture, retain or monitor depend on its activities, policies and applicable regulatory requirements.
Depending on the organization, communication surveillance may cover:
- Email — Internal and external business correspondence
- Enterprise chat — Communications through platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Bloomberg and other collaboration or messaging tools
- Mobile messaging — SMS, WhatsApp and other business messaging applications
- Voice — Recorded calls and other captured audio communications
- Trading communications — Communications associated with trading and other regulated activities
- Social and collaboration platforms — Relevant business communications conducted through these channels
- Attachments and files — Documents and other content exchanged as part of communications
Bringing relevant communications together can give investigators more context by allowing related activity to be reviewed across channels rather than solely as isolated messages.
Connectors and integrations
Before communications can be analyzed, the relevant data has to be captured and brought into the surveillance environment. This makes data ingestion an important part of communication surveillance.
Connectors provide the link between the platforms employees use to communicate and the systems responsible for archiving, surveillance, supervision and investigation.
Shield provides connectors for communications and data sources used across regulated organizations. These include dedicated connectors for channels such as:
Connectors can preserve communication content and associated metadata as it moves from the source into the compliance environment. Once ingested, that information can be made available for surveillance alongside communications from other supported channels.
This cross-channel approach matters because a single business conversation may move between email, messaging, voice and collaboration platforms.
How Does Communication Surveillance Work?
Communication surveillance can use several complementary methods to identify communications and behaviors that may require investigation.
Older Method of Lexicons and Rules
A surveillance lexicon is a structured collection of words, phrases, linguistic patterns and rules designed to identify communications associated with defined risks.
For example, a firm may configure surveillance to identify language potentially associated with concealment, inappropriate information sharing or attempts to move a conversation to an unauthorized channel.
Lexicons remain useful because they are explicit, controllable and auditable. Their limitation is context: the presence of a particular word or phrase does not necessarily indicate misconduct.
That can result in false positives, where legitimate communications are selected for review because they match a detection rule despite not representing the risk the rule was designed to identify.
Modern Machine Learning, NLP and LLM-Based Analysis
Machine learning and natural language processing can extend surveillance beyond exact keyword matching by identifying linguistic patterns, semantic relationships and other characteristics within communications.
These approaches complement rules and lexicons by providing additional ways to identify potentially relevant communications and evaluate them in context.
Large language models add the ability to analyze meaning across longer passages of text and consider relationships between different pieces of information.
In communication surveillance, LLMs can be applied to tasks such as interpreting indirect language, evaluating communications in context, summarizing relevant evidence and explaining why particular content may represent risk.
LLM output still needs to operate within appropriate controls and governance. An AI-generated assessment should not automatically be treated as evidence that misconduct occurred.
Behavioral and Contextual Signals
Risk may also be identified through information beyond the words themselves.
Surveillance systems can consider signals such as participants, communication patterns, timing, relationships, channel changes and other available metadata.
Combining communication content with contextual and behavioral signals can provide compliance teams with additional information when determining whether an alert warrants further investigation.
What Risks Can Communication Surveillance Help Detect?
Communication surveillance programs are generally configured around the risks relevant to a firm’s business, regulatory obligations and internal policies.
These can include:
- Collusion — Potential coordination between employees, traders, brokers or counterparties
- Insider trading — Communications potentially associated with trading involving material non-public information
- Material non-public information (MNPI) — Potential sharing or misuse of information that is both material and not publicly available
- Front running — Potential use of advance knowledge of a pending transaction to trade ahead of it
- Conflicts of interest — Communications that may indicate competing personal, professional or client interests
- Wash trading and pump-and-dump activity — Communications that may provide context around certain forms of market manipulation
- Off-channel communications and attempts to circumvent communication controls
- Fraud or deceptive conduct
- Employee misconduct
- Inappropriate sales practices
- Internal policy violations
Communication evidence alone does not necessarily establish that misconduct occurred. Surveillance is designed to identify signals and communications that may warrant review or further investigation.
The precise scenarios monitored depend on the firm’s activities, risk assessment, policies and regulatory requirements.
Communication Surveillance vs. Communication Supervision
Communication surveillance and communication supervision are related but distinct.
Communication surveillance focuses on analyzing communications to identify patterns, behaviors or content that may indicate risk and require further review.
Communication supervision concerns the processes through which organizations review communications, apply supervisory policies, document decisions and manage identified issues.
In practice, the two can work together. Surveillance surfaces potential risk, while supervision provides the workflow through which alerts are reviewed, resolved or escalated.
Communication Surveillance, Archiving and eDiscovery
Communication surveillance is part of a broader communications compliance environment.
Archiving preserves communications and associated records according to the firm’s applicable requirements and policies.
Surveillance analyzes relevant communications for indicators of potential risk.
eDiscovery provides processes for identifying, preserving, collecting, reviewing and producing electronically stored information for legal proceedings, regulatory investigations or internal inquiries.
These capabilities form part of the broader discipline of Digital Communications Governance and Archiving (DCGA), which brings together the governance, capture, retention, monitoring and use of digital communications.
Connecting these capabilities can help organizations maintain communications records and use the same underlying information for surveillance, supervision, investigations and regulatory or legal requests.
AI and the Evolution of Communication Surveillance
Communication surveillance has evolved as both communications technology and analytical methods have changed.
A simple way to think about this evolution is that communication surveillance has moved from lexicon-based detection to machine learning and NLP, then to LLM-powered reasoning, and now toward agentic surveillance. Each stage builds on what came before, adding new ways to detect, understand and investigate risk.
Lexicons provide explicit rules for identifying defined words, phrases and patterns. Machine learning and NLP can identify broader linguistic and semantic patterns. LLMs add the ability to analyze longer conversations, indirect language and multiple pieces of information in context.
Agentic approaches extend these capabilities into defined workflows. An AI agent can apply LLM-based analysis to tasks such as gathering relevant context, correlating evidence, prioritizing information or supporting an investigation or alert-review process within established controls.
These technologies are better understood as complementary layers rather than replacements for one another. Lexicons, statistical models, LLMs and agents can each perform different functions within a surveillance program.
More sophisticated technology also does not remove the need for governance and human oversight. Firms need appropriate processes for determining how surveillance technologies are configured, tested, monitored and used within their compliance programs.
Why Is Communication Surveillance Important?
Financial institutions can generate large volumes of communications across numerous channels.
Reviewing every communication manually is impractical at scale, while broad detection rules can generate large numbers of alerts requiring review.
Communication surveillance can help firms:
- Identify communications that may warrant further investigation
- Monitor defined risks across relevant communication channels
- Prioritize communications for human review
- Provide investigators with additional context
- Maintain records of surveillance and investigation activity
- Support broader compliance and supervisory processes
The purpose is not simply to monitor more communications. Effective surveillance aims to identify relevant risk and provide compliance teams with enough information to determine whether further investigation or action is required.
Communication Surveillance in Financial Services
Communication surveillance is particularly relevant to financial services because communications can provide important evidence and context around trading, client interactions, confidential information and employee conduct.
The requirements that apply depend on the type of firm, its activities and the jurisdictions in which it operates.
As business communications expand across email, messaging, collaboration platforms, mobile applications and voice, firms also need to consider how relevant communications are captured and made available for monitoring.
This makes communication surveillance part of a broader data lifecycle: communications are generated in source platforms, captured through appropriate integrations or connectors, ingested into the compliance environment, retained where required, analyzed for risk and made available for review or investigation.
Communication Surveillance with Shield
Shield provides communication surveillance as part of its Digital Communications Governance and Archiving platform.
Shield brings communications from supported channels into a unified environment where data can be used across archiving, surveillance, supervision, investigation and eDiscovery.
Its surveillance approach combines established techniques such as lexicons with AI-based analysis designed to evaluate communications and their surrounding context.
Through Shield’s communications connectors, organizations can bring communications from sources including email, Microsoft Teams, Bloomberg, WhatsApp, Slack and other supported channels into the platform for compliance use.
This allows surveillance to operate across communication sources rather than treating each channel as a completely separate compliance environment.