Legacy voice recording platforms rarely draw attention until a regulator comes knocking. In regulated firms, ageing recorders, orphaned metadata and forgotten codecs sit quietly in the background, right up until an audit demands a specific call. What looks like routine infrastructure maintenance can quickly turn into a costly compliance failure.
The default response when an old voice recorder reaches end-of-support is to migrate the data to a new system. In practice, this is rarely straightforward. Voice data is not comparable to email. Codecs, encryption wrappers, time-aligned metadata and legal holds all introduce fragility that only becomes apparent once a migration is already underway, said Wordwatch.
Wordwatch recently delved into what it sees as the cost of botched voice data migrations and why they matter.
There are several ways these migrations go wrong. Manual migrations, often billed through consultancy day rates and custom scripting, can become a recurring cost every time a recorder reaches end-of-support.
The process of transcoding or re-encrypting files risks breaking the chain of custody, undermining call authenticity in the eyes of regulators. Rewriting metadata increases the risk of orphaning media, disconnecting calls from the individuals, context and policies attached to them. Transcoding itself can inflate file sizes by up to 16 times, driving up storage costs and slowing retrieval.
Perhaps most seriously, misconfigured migrations can miss legal holds or retention expiry dates. Under MiFID II Article 16(7), firms must retain records of relevant conversations for at least five years, and up to seven if a competent authority requests it. If a legal hold fails to transfer correctly, calls can be deleted permanently.
The FCA’s 2025 review noted that organisations experienced “delays or missing recorded data from vendors”, reflecting the same underlying issue. Beyond the technical risk, these migrations consume significant time from compliance, IT and legal teams, while valuable metadata such as annotations and case associations is often lost, limiting future search and surveillance capability.
Wordwatch positions itself as an alternative to this cycle. The platform consolidates recordings from legacy and live sources into a single system without reformatting or transferring data, preserving records in their original format to protect the audit trail. Wordwatch applies and preserves regulatory and legal hold metadata during ingestion, automating retention enforcement.
The company states this approach can cut server estates by up to 98% and reduce annual maintenance costs by up to 80%, while keeping historical voice data usable for surveillance platforms, data warehouses or AI models.
Read the full Wordwatch post here.
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