Regulated firms can record Teams Phone calls in a way that satisfies MiFID II and FCA recordkeeping rules, but only through a certified compliance recording integration. Under this approach, calls are captured in real time under an administrator policy that users cannot disable.
According to Wordwatch, the recordings must then be kept in their original format with a clear chain of custody, and retained for five years under MiFID II Article 16(7), with the regulator able to extend that period to seven.
The urgency stems from a shift in how trading desks communicate. By 2026, Teams has moved beyond being a collaboration tool layered over traditional telephony and has effectively become the phone system itself on many regulated desks.
Calls once routed through turrets, PBX lines and trader voice handsets now increasingly run over Teams Phone, meaning conversations that lead to trades often begin there.
Crucially, recordkeeping duties apply to the conversation rather than the technology carrying it. A trade-related call on Teams Phone faces the same capture, retention and retrieval requirements as one made on a turret.
Microsoft draws a clear line between two capabilities. Native Teams recording is started by the user, stored in OneDrive and SharePoint, and intended for meeting notes and resolving disputes.
Compliance recording is administrator-controlled, cannot be switched off by the user, and relies on a certified partner solution capturing calls through the Teams calling infrastructure. Only the latter was built with MiFID II and FCA evidential standards in mind, which is why native recording alone is widely considered inadequate for regulated voice.
Article 16(7) sets out four obligations. Firms must record all communications intended to lead to a transaction across every channel in use, retain them for five years (extendable to seven, applied by the FCA through SYSC 10A.1), preserve them in a form that cannot be altered or deleted, and produce them on demand in an accessible format.
The phrase “intended to lead to a transaction” stretches the scope back to negotiations and relationship conversations, precisely the kind of Teams traffic that resembles routine internal collaboration and is easily missed.
While the 2024 MiFID II and MiFIR review, dubbed MiFID III, overhauled market structure with a consolidated tape and a ban on payment for order flow, it left Article 16(7) untouched.
What has changed is supervision. The FCA’s off-channel communications review, published on 7 August 2025, examined 11 wholesale banks and identified 178 confirmed policy breaches over twelve months, 41% involving director-level staff or above. It also highlighted vendor failures, including outages and missing data, stressing that accountability remains with the regulated firm.
Compliance demands more than a stored audio file. Recordings must be reconciled against call and trade data and integrated with the wider trader voice estate, so that a single transaction can be reconstructed across turret calls, Teams Phone, chat and mobile messages. A Wordwatch-commissioned survey found 52% of respondents were not comprehensively capturing trader voice and turrets, while 34% lacked full capture of Zoom or online meetings.
The real test is no longer whether a call was recorded, but whether firms can prove it, retrieve it intact and link it to the trade it produced.
Read the full Wordwatch post here.
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
