Banking Records Retention and Information Governance Training Course

Course overview

Banks hold records that must be retained long enough to satisfy prudential, anti-money-laundering, tax, conduct, audit, litigation and customer-service obligations, yet disposed of when their business and legal value ends. Account-opening files, KYC evidence, transaction records, credit decisions, call recordings, complaints, trading communications and board materials often sit across multiple platforms with inconsistent ownership. This creates avoidable exposure: records cannot be produced during an examination, legal holds are applied too late, duplicate content is retained indefinitely, or personal data is deleted despite an ongoing obligation.

This course gives banking professionals a practical framework for designing and operating defensible records retention and information governance controls. Participants learn to build a banking records inventory, classify records by function and risk, translate regulatory obligations into a retention schedule, assign accountable record owners, apply event-based retention triggers, and manage disposition approvals. The course addresses legal holds, audit trails, metadata, privacy conflicts, cross-border data considerations, third-party records and the control of information held in email, collaboration platforms and core banking systems.

Instructor-led sessions combine banking scenarios with working exercises using retention schedules, records inventories, hold notices and disposition decision logs. Participants assess a realistic bank information landscape, identify high-risk record series, and test how a regulatory inquiry or litigation hold changes normal destruction activity. They leave with a completed Banking Records Retention Control Pack: a draft records inventory, retention-rule template, legal-hold workflow, ownership matrix and 90-day implementation plan that can be adapted to their institution's jurisdiction and systems.

The course is suited to professionals who own, govern, store, retrieve or assure banking records, from records managers and compliance staff to operations leaders, risk teams and technology personnel. It is particularly valuable where a bank is rationalising repositories, responding to audit findings, implementing Microsoft Purview or OpenText, or strengthening evidence management before regulatory scrutiny.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Build a banking records inventory that maps record series, repositories, owners, formats and regulatory obligations.
• Classify banking information using a business-function taxonomy, sensitivity labels and evidential-value criteria.
• Create a retention schedule with trigger events, minimum retention periods, review dates and approved disposition actions.
• Apply legal-hold procedures that suspend destruction, preserve relevant sources and document release decisions.
• Map KYC, AML, transaction, credit, complaint and customer-communication records to defensible retention controls.
• Configure a records governance workflow using metadata, retention labels, disposition review and audit-trail requirements.
• Assess privacy, confidentiality and cross-border data issues when retention obligations conflict with deletion requests.
• Produce a 90-day information governance improvement plan with control owners, milestones, evidence and risk measures.

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Records and Information Managers — who design retention schedules and need defensible controls for regulated banking records
• Bank Compliance Officers — who must evidence compliance with recordkeeping, AML, conduct and supervisory requirements
• Operational Risk Managers — who assess information-control failures and track remediation across business units
• Banking Operations Managers — who own account, payment, lending and customer-service records in daily processes
• Legal Counsel and Litigation Support Staff — who coordinate preservation, legal holds, disclosure and defensible disposition
• Information Technology and Data Governance Leads — who configure repositories, metadata, retention labels and access controls

Requirements and prerequisites

This is a foundation-to-intermediate course. Participants should understand their bank's main products, business functions and the basic distinction between customer data, operational records and documents. Familiarity with one or more internal repositories, such as a document management system, email archive, shared drive or core banking application, will help participants apply the exercises. No prior records-management qualification, legal training, coding ability or Microsoft Purview administration experience is required. Complete beginners should expect to work with practical templates and learn the vocabulary of retention schedules, record series, legal holds, metadata and disposition from first principles.

Training methodology

The course is delivered through instructor-led briefings, annotated banking case studies and structured workshops. Participants examine sample KYC files, loan records, payment evidence, complaints, trading communications and board materials to determine classification, ownership, retention triggers and disposal requirements. Small groups work through a regulator-request and litigation-hold scenario, documenting decisions in records inventory and disposition templates. The final day uses peer review to test each participant's control pack, followed by individual application planning for their own repositories, stakeholders and priority risks.

Course outline

Day 1: Banking records governance foundations

• Banking record lifecycle from creation to defensible disposition
• Records, documents, data and evidence distinctions
• Information governance roles using the three-lines model
• Bank record categories: KYC, transactions, lending and conduct
• Business-function classification versus repository-based filing
• Record ownership, system ownership and accountability matrices
• ISO 15489 principles applied to regulated banking records

Workshop: Participants map a sample retail bank's records landscape and produce an initial inventory of record series, systems, owners and risks.

Day 2: Retention rules and regulatory obligations

• Retention schedule architecture and record-series definitions
• Minimum retention periods, maximum periods and review cycles
• Event-based triggers for account closure, loan maturity and investigation closure
• Obligation mapping for AML, KYC, tax, prudential and conduct records
• Retention treatment for complaints, vulnerable-customer and call-recording evidence
• Policy hierarchy: law, regulation, contract, internal policy and operational need
• Documenting jurisdictional assumptions and regulatory change controls

Workshop: Participants convert a set of banking obligations into a retention schedule with triggers, sources, owners and disposition actions.

Day 3: Controls, metadata and technology

• Metadata fields for record identity, classification, owner and retention event
• File plans, taxonomy design and controlled vocabulary
• Microsoft Purview retention labels and label publishing concepts
• OpenText Content Management records declaration and classification concepts
• Audit trails, immutable logs and evidence of control operation
• Email, Teams and shared-drive records capture strategies
• Third-party, cloud and outsourced-service recordkeeping requirements

Workshop: Participants design a metadata schema and retention-label model for customer onboarding and credit-approval records.

Day 4: Legal holds, privacy and defensible disposal

• Legal-hold triggers, scoping and preservation notices
• Suspending automated disposition during investigations and disputes
• Hold custodian identification and acknowledgement tracking
• Privacy deletion requests versus mandatory retention obligations
• Cross-border transfer, localisation and restricted-access considerations
• Disposition review, approval segregation and destruction certificates
• Testing defensibility through audit sampling and exception registers

Workshop: Participants manage a simulated misconduct investigation and produce a legal-hold notice, source register and disposition suspension log.

Day 5: Operating model and implementation planning

• Records governance operating-model design
• Control ownership using RACI and escalation paths
• Risk assessment for high-value and high-risk record series
• Metrics for retention compliance, holds, retrieval and overdue disposition
• Records-management audit plans and evidence packs
• Repository migration and legacy-data remediation decisions
• Ninety-day implementation roadmap and stakeholder engagement

Workshop: Participants complete and peer-review a Banking Records Retention Control Pack and produce a prioritised 90-day implementation plan.

Tools & standards covered

Microsoft Purview Records Management, OpenText Content Management, ISO 15489-1:2016, ISO/IEC 27001:2022

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions