Dima Gutzeit is the Founder and CEO of LeapXpert, a leader in digital communications governance serving enterprises across 45+ countries.
For most regulated companies, years’ worth of communication data sits untouched in archives. It was captured because regulation required it. However, many companies are unaware of the wealth of information they’re sitting on. For years, it’s been no one’s job to dig into it.
Archiving data and understanding it are vastly different. Archiving data is checking a regulatory box. Understanding it unlocks what the data can do.
Capture: The Bare Minimum
The instinct to lock it all down isn’t wrong. Between 2021 and 2024, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission levied more than $2 billion in fines against financial institutions for failing to capture off-channel communications. The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority also identified 178 record-keeping breaches across 11 wholesale banks in an August 2025 review.
Firms built compliance infrastructure to capture messages and meet regulatory requirements. However, capturing messages and understanding them aren’t the same, and most companies have focused on the former.
The archive grew. Millions of messages entered the system every month, compliance teams checked the pipeline, and in most cases, that was the end of it.
Commercial Memory Hiding In Plain Sight
An employee resigns, returns the laptop and has their badge deactivated. The personal device holding the WhatsApp thread that led to a contract or the messages showing a client was at risk of leaving may never have been accessible to the company.
Even when conversations are retained for compliance, their value is lost if nobody reads them. CRMs hold contract values, renewal dates and account notes. They can’t explain why a major client nearly walked away or what was said to keep them if those conversations were never reviewed.
Some of the most useful signals are tonal. A client who replies in one line instead of three has told you something. No CRM field captures that. More direct clues may also be sitting in the conversation: a fee waived because a client is close to leaving, a concern raised before a renewal or a promise made to a customer that never made it into the account record.
The AI Deadline: Same Habit, More Expensive
Companies are moving quickly to put AI to work across their data. A 2025 report from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance found that 81% of surveyed financial services firms were using AI. Meanwhile Nvidia’s January 2026 “State of AI in Financial Services” survey found one in five respondents had already deployed AI agents, with a further 42% exploring them.
Much of the data feeding those tools comes from systems holding transactions, customer details and formal documents. The conversation that delayed a deal or the follow-up promised on WhatsApp or Teams may sit elsewhere.
An AI agent may know the account history in the CRM and the value of an opportunity but not why it stalled or what the client needs next. If business conversations are captured only for retention, that context remains unused.
Why Companies Are Cautious
Moving from retaining communications for compliance to analyzing them more actively raises different questions. Some hesitation comes from a sense that the job is already done. In conversations with financial institutions, I often hear that they already archive their communications. In many cases they do, but those systems were built primarily to meet regulatory requirements rather than help the wider business understand what’s happening inside those conversations.
Privacy is a separate concern because communication records can contain personal, financial and other sensitive information. Privacy principles can favor retaining less information, while financial services and other regulations may require some records to be preserved for years. Using those records for an additional purpose also raises questions about who should have access and how that use is governed.
Business conversations now take place across email, WhatsApp, Teams, SMS, WeChat and other platforms, often across multiple devices, while many firms built their archiving strategies around a narrower set of channels. That fragmentation can make any move toward wider analysis harder to implement and govern.
Ownership presents a further challenge because communication data cuts across legal, compliance, IT, security and business teams. Each may have a different reason for keeping it and a different view of how it should be used. Moving beyond archiving requires agreement on what information can be analyzed, for what purpose and by whom.
What Needs To Change
The industry needs to make that transition easier and give companies greater confidence in how communication data will be handled.
Companies should have controls over what’s captured, who can access it, how long it’s retained and what additional analysis is permitted. Those controls should also work across the communication channels employees and clients already use. Vendors can help by making it easier to apply the same policies across all business messaging channels rather than leaving firms to manage each one differently.
The industry also needs to help companies begin with a defined reason for analyzing communication data. Choose one important account and trace the conversations around it. Where did the key decisions take place? What would a new account owner be able to see? In many organizations, they would find a CRM record, a renewal date and a contact number, with little sense of the relationship behind them.
Starting with a single account can show where useful context is being lost, who needs access to it and what controls are required. That gives companies a clearer basis for deciding where communication data can genuinely improve decisions and where the risks outweigh the value.
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