The business world has continued to see tremendous success on the back of the digital transformation wave and much of that success rests on effective business communications. Statista estimates that over 3 billion people use at least one messaging app daily, with WhatsApp being the leading communication channel for global smartphone users in 2022. As of 2020, the platform facilitated the exchange of over 100 billion messages on a daily basis, according to an analysis by Techcrunch.
In today’s fast-paced business world, professionals need to be easily accessible, as business success is largely dependent on amazing customer relationships. From retail to logistics to banking and more, customers increasingly want to be able to chat in real-time with the businesses whose services they use. That’s why the average business professional today uses several messaging apps both for internal and external business communications. But often, these apps are sprawled across multiple devices which can make communication cumbersome and also erode trust in client-business relationships.
While the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) model allowed employees to use a single device for both business and personal purposes, a recent survey revealed a dramatic resurgence of the two-device approach. The study, conducted by digital compliance firm Shield, showed that particularly in the banking sector, more than half of respondents provide a company-owned phone to employees, exclusively for business use. Imagine the complexity of a scenario where an employee uses two phone numbers— one for business and the other for personal purposes— and needs to always switch between both devices
There’s a need to eliminate such a complicated approach — which expands the possibility for human error in doing business. That’s where LeapXpert, a pioneer in responsible business communications, comes in. The New York-based company enables business professionals to have a single professional identity with which they can communicate in a secure and compliant manner with clients across several messaging apps. It sounds simple, but its use case for businesses is more critical than you can imagine.
The Single Professional Identity
Picture this: You meet a potential Fortune 500 client as the Sales Manager at your company and are near getting them on board. Your contact at the Fortune 500 company gets to her office, dials your landline, only to get an out-of-office voice prompt. She tries your company’s switchboard number and they redirect her to the landline. She texts you on iMessage and gets no response. In her last attempt to reach you, she puts a call through to your mobile phone later in the day and she finally gets through. But guess what? While the conversation goes on, it’s not recorded, logged, or governed by your company. As far as your company is concerned, no one ever initiated a conversation regarding an engagement opportunity with the company. Problems like this are one of the things the Single Professional Identity wants to solve.
The Single Professional Identity holds the potential to be the holy grail of enterprise communications. It facilitates diverse communication channels in a unified framework and seamlessly integrates voice and popular messaging apps like iMessage, WhatsApp, SMS, and more under a single corporate identity. With the Single Professional Identity platform, employees benefit from retaining personal privacy, while enabling recordable business conversations. Think of it as a consolidation of all communication channels — which would typically require several phone numbers and identities — into one platform where an employee can effortlessly communicate on various channels using one identity.
In a recent whitepaper, LeapXpert explains that “a unified Single Professional Identity using a dedicated work phone is the obvious answer; let’s set aside the confusing dynamic of using a single “hybrid” personal/ work phone, where some conversations are personal and private while others must be captured for compliance reasons. Or the dilemma of answering a call from an unrecognized number that may be personal or work-related. Or, of course, asking international clients to call you via long distance — or through a dedicated VoIP app that they don’t like or cannot even access in their country.”
Using LeapXpert, companies provide their employees a single phone number for business communication through iMessage, WhatsApp, SMS, Telegram, WeChat, Signal, LINE, and voice calls. They are able to keep their existing fixed or mobile number using number portability or get a new number in dozens of countries around the world — either a virtual number or a mobile number attached to a LeapXpert SIM card. All employees’ business communication can be recorded, while their personal messages remain private. Meanwhile, clients continue to communicate with business professionals natively on their preferred messaging app. The platform also integrates natively with Microsoft Teams, enabling employees to use one single tool for internal and external communications.
Compliance and privacy: Offering the best of both worlds
The real balance that many enterprises seek is to comply with regulations and protect professional privacy — a tightrope that requires sacrifice. As LeapXpert’s whitepaper notes, “compliance requirements for all communication channels — particularly for financial institutions — are stringent, and ignoring them can result in substantial fines. Specifically, financial institutions must monitor and record work-related communications across all communication channels. This includes recording communications that result in a business transaction, all the way down to general, informal conversations in which securities, portfolio status, or even news about the market are discussed.” Failure to adhere to such requirements can have devastating consequences.
For example, in September of 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commision (SEC) charged 16 Wall Street firms with massive recordkeeping failures. The firms agreed to pay combined penalties of more than $1.1 billion and “have begun implementing improvements to their compliance policies and procedures to settle these matters,” according to the SEC. On the same day, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced it had ordered 11 institutions to pay over $710 million for similar failures and “widespread use of unapproved communication methods.”
Such pressures are growing in Europe too, particularly in Germany and the UK. In October of this year, it was reported that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK is also demanding answers from authorized firms with respect to capturing and monitoring instant messaging platforms for compliance risk. Given these regulatory challenges, enterprises need to conduct a more nuanced review of their employees’ use of instant messaging and consider appropriate next steps that not only comply with regulations but also ensure business communications are fast, seamless, reliable, controlled, and secure.
LeapXpert provides enterprises peace of mind through compliant and secure communication platforms. The company also helps enterprise employees and clients to communicate on messaging applications and voice channels in a compliant, governed, and secure manner.
Setting the standard for enterprise communications
With different solutions geared towards the ability to have professional conversations on any application of choice in a compliant manner, LeapXpert wants to champion the cause. As Dima Gutzeit, founder and CEO at LeapXpert notes, “many financial institutions want to use messaging apps like iMessage to keep up with client demands, but some corporate policies do not permit the use of native consumer messaging apps because they do not have the tools to capture and archive such conversations. Our platform enables, captures and governs iMessage messages, for example, so that employees can communicate with their clients on iMessage in a responsible manner, while meeting recordkeeping requirements and safeguarding employee privacy.”
According to a LeapXpert company spokesperson, “our goal is to enable seamless business communications through our Single Professional Identity capability, while ensuring these conversations are conducted in a responsible manner. It means that we offer enterprise controls, such as message capture, voice recording and more for compliance purposes, data security and access controls for governance purposes and automation controls for enterprise data efficiency. These controls meet the needs for governance, security and compliance purposes.”
Founded in 2017, LeapXpert is headquartered in New York City. The company currently employs 150 people across its offices in the United States , the United Kingdom, Israel, and Asia.
