TD Securities builds on its Microsoft 365 Communication Compliance infrastructure with a highly secure, compliant global Microsoft Teams deployment

TD Securities is the wholesale bank division of TD Bank and is based in Canada with offices across the globe. Among financial services organizations, TD Securities has one of the largest Microsoft 365 deployments, having brought some 135,000 endpoints under administration since 2018. An overall cloud migration effort at TD Securities was already underway when COVID-19 arrived, with IT specialists already focused on building a secure, compliant infrastructure. They planned to build on that infrastructure with adoption of the latest technologies for enhanced communication and collaboration and an improved user experience across all business units.

Essential compliance prep work

The technology team, led by Cynthia Many, Vice President of Employee Enablement at TD Bank, recently completed a major migration. It shifted the company from an earlier environment with Skype, SharePoint, and third-party applications to a consolidated infrastructure built around Microsoft Teams for some 80,000 workers at TD Bank, including more than 4,500 employees at TD Securities. Many emphasizes that upfront work establishing the Microsoft 365 platform and its supervision capabilities was an important factor in being able to adopt new technologies, such as Teams, so quickly and proactively. “Think about the choreographing that had to take place, the underpinning of the compliance environment that we had to meet,” she says. “All that effort paid off in the dividends that we’re seeing now, the pace with which we can advance our capabilities with new technologies.” Continues Many, “Without the Microsoft 365 Communication Compliance solution providing a compliant environment for Microsoft Teams, for example, our successful COVID-19 response would have been a whole lot harder.”

A flawless and highly-secure rollout

Daniel Bosman is Managing Director and Vice President at TD Securities. He points out that, before any other consideration, security and compliance are fundamental business requirements for any financial services organization. TD Securities is subject to supervisory compliance requirements and deploying Teams would require making sure it met strict regulatory mandates.

An inability to supervise brokers would have complicated, delayed, or even prevented any planned global rollout of new communications and collaboration capabilities. “That’s something we have to have in place across any and all of our communications channels. But we saw urgent global demand for Microsoft Teams with the move to remote working as a result of the pandemic, and we were able to meet that demand with confidence by using the appropriate supervision tools and procedures in Microsoft 365,” says Bosman. “The Microsoft 365 Communication Compliance platform enabled us to address our regulatory obligations while providing the security and stability we absolutely needed.” Administrators were able to create policies for sensitive information and regulatory compliance that enabled them to meet their obligations, to gain actionable insights, and to develop workflows to mitigate any detected compliance issues.

Christiaan Veerman is the Head of Work Enablement and Transactional Data Engineering. He says the new environment covers both sides of a two-sided issue, supporting not only the brokers but other groups across the organization including IT, Legal, and HR. “It’s a high-collaboration model that broadly facilitates communication and cooperation. That’s the default—if you are given permissions to access the tool, you can collaborate,” he says. “But on the other side, ours remains a highly-regulated environment, where we need to oversee activity we can use a least-privilege model and we can maintain a zero-trust model without getting in the way. Teams and our Microsoft 365 Communication Compliance infrastructure allows us to do both.”

Repurposed compliance processes and workflows

An important part of the Teams adoption effort was the ability to repurpose compliance work that was already a part of the legacy environment and adapt those processes to develop new policies to better support internal and external supervision in Microsoft 365. For example, TD Securities had considerable investment in a lexicon-based information classification system so it could satisfy multiple regulatory mandates across the globe for data storage, sharing, and communication. Lara Morgan, Product Delivery Lead at TD Securities, says, “Collaborating with Microsoft and Christiaan’s data science team, we were able to repurpose our existing communications surveillance framework and that really helped us fast-track a deployment of Teams that met internal company policy compliance requirements, and also external regulatory mandates.”

A compliant foundation for more effective collaboration

The new Teams environment makes it easier for project participants to access all the information they need and to ensure everyone is—often literally—on the same page. But with that widespread adoption comes a corresponding requirement to manage risk, to prevent inadvertent or malicious transgression of company policies or regulatory mandates, and to proactively identify and mitigate communications from external malicious actors. Communication Compliance in Microsoft 365 provides templates, tools, and insights that address these issues across the entire TD Securities communication infrastructure, including Microsoft Teams, with machine learning support that can make the implementation of compliance policies smarter and increasingly transparent over time.

As a result, Veerman says, “We could roll out Teams quite seamlessly to the users. There was no new effort required to track the operation of the new compliance processes. The business management teams could manage operations within their familiar Microsoft 365 compliance centers.”

A culture of inclusion at TD Securities

TD Securities is proud of its accessible workplace, which provides equal opportunity and encourages full participation for all employees. It’s important not only for the health and wellbeing of those workers; it also leads to a more effective, efficient, and productive organization. Bosman offers the example of how the global Teams rollout facilitated a much more inclusive environment, where contributions can be drawn from a much larger pool of employees. Previously, meetings and events might be limited to a single geographical location, sometimes supplemented by voice or video that inevitably favored the local team at the expense of remote participants. But at a recent “Virtual Innovation” conference driven in Teams, Bosman says, “We had over 1,400 participants over two days. Previously, when we’d done this kind of conference in person, maybe we would get 200.” He adds, “We’re connecting as one global team more than we could before. Our teams in Singapore and London told us that they now feel they can contribute on a level playing field.”

Teamwork for the future

Bosman says that once the Teams deployment began, the process took on a viral nature that turned an effort to roll out the technology into a rush to satisfy demand from employees who recognized its advantages. He’s quick to credit Many and her team for managing the process so effectively and for building supportive relationships with Microsoft and with internal business groups. This teamwork, Bosman says, “enabled the organization to pivot to support our colleagues and our customers wherever they need to be.” He adds, “Honestly, the Microsoft Teams rollout was as close to flawless as I think you can get for something that impacts so many users.”

TD Securities will be building on its new Microsoft 365 platform, adopting new features, and continuing to work in tandem with Microsoft to help develop and enhance those capabilities for the financial services environment. Bosman sums it up: “It’s just exceptional, the way the two teams were able to rally and adapt,” he says. “And I do think we gained confidence from the fact that our cloud-enabled platform is highly compliant, secure, and stable. That’s key to a responsive and proactive business infrastructure.”

Learn more about TD Securities, about Microsoft 365 Communication Compliance and about Microsoft Teams.