When a regulator comes knocking, it does not ask for a single channel’s records. It asks about a person: a name, a time window and a question about what that individual said. Yet the surveillance systems at most banks are built the opposite way, and that mismatch is becoming a serious compliance liability.
According to Wordwatch, each communications channel relies on its own identifier, whether a mailbox, chat handle, mobile number, turret extension or device ID. None of these is the person. Linking them together is a task someone must deliberately complete, and according to 1LoD’s 2026 Surveillance Benchmarking Survey and Report, most banks have yet to finish it.
Two heads of surveillance at US banks highlighted the same weakness in the research. One said their firm had still not rolled out a unique identifier across all voice channels capable of reliably preventing duplication or misidentification.
The other described the broader challenge of recognising an individual across every platform, so that both voice and e-comms are consistently attributed to the correct person.
The scale of the problem is growing. Roughly 22% of banks now monitor more than 30 electronic communications channels, up from 14% in 2024, while a third monitor more than 20. One US bank’s audit uncovered around 70 further channels that may require monitoring or restriction.
Every new channel introduces another identifier to reconcile, and that reconciliation seldom arrives bundled with the channel itself. Meanwhile, 24% of respondents cited a lack of standardised data formats or identifiers as the data issue most hampering their surveillance, placing it level with fragmented data across silos. In effect, this is an identity problem dressed up in the language of data architecture.
The consequences are significant, even if they rarely appear on a dashboard. Detection is the first casualty. Channel hopping can only be spotted when activity is attributed to one individual, so a conversation beginning on Teams and ending on WhatsApp looks like two unconnected fragments.
Review workloads rise next, as one person appearing under four identities triggers duplicate alerts that analysts handle separately. Finally, investigations become laborious, with teams manually piecing together activity across multiple consoles, slowing retrieval and weakening chain of custody.
Identity resolution is often treated as a feature of surveillance tools, but it sits awkwardly there. A surveillance platform only sees the data it ingests, meaning mappings must be rebuilt whenever a tool is swapped or a channel is added, and legacy systems outside its reach are never covered.
The record layer offers a more natural home. Every channel passes through it on entry, and the mapping endures regardless of what sits on top.
A simple internal test is revealing. Choose an employee with five years’ tenure and measure how long it takes to retrieve everything they said last quarter across every channel. If the answer involves several consoles and heavy manual effort, the identifiers were never tied to the person before the records were stored.
Read the full Wordwatch post here.
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