Industry Insights Report: Compliant Communications 2023

What did the 2023 Industry Insights report reveal?

Global Relay’s first Industry Insights: Compliant Communications report examined how compliance teams were responding to increasing regulatory scrutiny of business communications, particularly the use of messaging apps, personal devices, and emerging digital channels.

The 2023 survey provides a useful historical benchmark for how regulated firms were managing off-channel communications before many of the compliance approaches seen in later Industry Insights reports became more established.

How were firms managing WhatsApp and WeChat in 2023?

Channel bans were the dominant response. In the 2023 survey, 59% of respondents said their organization had banned WhatsApp and WeChat for business communications.

However, 56% of respondents said they did not believe channel bans were an effective solution. This highlighted an early tension between restricting channels and finding a practical way to capture and monitor the communications employees and clients wanted to use.

Not every firm had a clear off-channel communications strategy

• 59% had banned WhatsApp and WeChat.
• 25.6% said they did not have a clear plan for managing electronic communications channels such as WhatsApp and WeChat.
• 10.3% said they allowed all communications channels and monitored them.

These figures make the 2023 report a useful baseline for measuring the later shift toward enabling and monitoring more communication channels.

What were compliance teams most concerned about?

Employee behavior was already one of the biggest challenges facing communications compliance teams. In 2023,
61.5% of respondents said their biggest concern was getting staff to comply with communications policies.

The finding suggests that off-channel communications were not only a technology problem. Firms also had to address the gap between formal policy and the way employees actually communicated in day-to-day business.

How difficult was it to capture and monitor communications?

The 2023 survey also showed the scale of the technical challenge created by an expanding communications environment.

• 23.1% of respondents reported difficulty capturing and storing communications data across all channels
• 53.8% reported difficulty monitoring all communications channels

As firms adopted collaboration, messaging, mobile, and social platforms, compliance teams had to consider how those sources could be captured consistently and made available for supervision and recordkeeping.

How were firms approaching BYOD?

Bring-your-own-device policies remained an important part of the 2023 compliance debate. The survey found that
35.9% of organizations offered a BYOD model for business communications, while 25.6% issued corporate devices to staff.

The findings captured an industry still deciding whether personal-device use should be restricted, replaced with corporate devices, or supported through technology capable of separating and monitoring compliant business communications.

Were firms expecting more regulatory action?

The survey also asked whether respondents expected U.K. regulators to follow the U.S. approach to recordkeeping enforcement.

• 38.5% said they were anticipating regulatory action and taking proactive steps.
• 10.3% said they were concerned that U.K. regulators could be next to act and that their organization was not prepared.

The responses show how U.S. enforcement activity was already influencing communications compliance decisions beyond the U.S. market.

What does the 2023 benchmark tell compliance teams?

The 2023 report captures an industry at an early stage of adapting to a more fragmented communications environment. Firms were heavily reliant on channel bans, many were uncertain that those bans would work, and compliance teams were still struggling with employee behavior, multi-channel monitoring, data capture, and device strategy.

Viewed alongside the 2024 and 2025 Industry Insights reports, the 2023 findings provide a valuable starting point for understanding how firms moved toward broader channel capture, more active monitoring, changing BYOD strategies, and increasingly technology-enabled communications governance.

Explore the full 2023 Industry Insights report

Read the full Global Relay Industry Insights Report: Compliant Communications 2023 for the original survey findings and practitioner insight on WhatsApp and WeChat, off-channel communications, BYOD, employee behavior, communications monitoring, and recordkeeping compliance.