Mark Bridge writes:

Recording a phone call made by a mobile phone isn’t particularly difficult – it’s something we do regularly for our podcasts – but recording every call made and received by a mobile phone isn’t so easy.

It’s even more of a problem for companies with dozens or even hundreds of employees using mobile phones... and yet, for many organisations, this type of thing will soon be a legal requirement.

To learn more, I’ve been talking to Ian Hook, vice-president of marketing at Compliant Phones. I started by asking Ian why companies would want to record all their mobile phone calls.

“It can be for regulatory compliance, and clearly that’s a very topical issue at the moment in the Square Mile - but it can be for a variety of other reasons as well. The reason beyond regulation is that it enables people to simply clarify communication, come back and not only address disputes but maybe pass on information to other people in an organisation that could help. It’s not a trivial task to record mobile, and therefore it’s taken some time for technology to catch up with the need - and that’s why people like the Financial Services Authority have taken a while to implement the mobile side of call recording, which is already established in the fixed-line world.”

The company’s technology enables it to offer mobile call recording on any network, recording calls automatically without the need to introduce an additional ‘conference call’ connection.

“We use some technology we’ve developed called Inline Mobile Recording. It allows the calls to be captured between you and me on a central recorder. And we do this with some clever technology that we place on the handset, which transfers the call through to this central server. The tricky thing is to do that without creating delays and lags on the call. In a trading environment, traders will not accept any degradation in the call set-up or the call itself.”

We went on to talk about the company’s partnerships, which include Vodafone and software giant Autonomy, the security of its products and its plans for the future.