The pandemic brought with it a spike in work-from-home and hybrid work, which increased peoples’ dependence on personal devices -- driving businesses to try and rein in their use. It's been a particular challenge for the financial services industry, which has comparatively strict governance and compliance requirements. In September, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fined Wall Street banks, including Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, $1.8 billion over failures in monitoring how staff used their personal phones to talk about work.

On the hunt for a solution to the chat compliance problem, three entrepreneurs -- Dima Gutzeit, Avi Pardo and Rina Charles -- decided to create their own, LeapXpert. LeapXpert allows employees to message customers or colleagues through popular apps, including WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage, Telegram and Signal, while monitoring and archiving their business-related chats.

"My co-founders and I were concerned that if businesses didn’t evolve fast enough to adopt modern messaging apps and transform this growing shadow communication into approved and reliable business communication mediums, there would be major negative implications," Gutzeit told TechCrunch in an email interview. "And so, LeapXpert was founded with a mission to help companies seize the opportunity to transform business communication."

Staffers might find the idea of an app that records their conversations disconcerting -- and rightly so. When asked about privacy, Gutzeit was open about the fact that LeapXpert can maintain "a complete record" of all conversations between a company's employees and third parties -- but added that LeapXpert itself doesn't have access to the data.

"Just like in cases of regulatory audits, when regulators turn directly to the financial institute, law enforcement agencies may request data directly from our customers," Gutzeit clarified. "It's then up to our customers to decide if and how much data to pull from their archiving system and hand over to the authorities. We aren't a party to any such transaction."