Zoom Beefed Up Compliance Team During Pandemic

By Mengqi Sun

Zoom Video Communications Inc. quietly built a multilayered compliance team last year to formalize its risk and ethics functions under one leader as the company became a household name during the global pandemic.

The San Jose, Calif.-based videoconferencing company hired its first chief compliance officer in January 2020 and built a new compliance team with the addition of 50 more lawyers and compliance professionals, Lynn Haaland, Zoom's deputy general counsel and chief compliance and ethics officer, said Wednesday at the WSJ Risk & Compliance Forum.

"There really hasn't been for me a 'pre-pandemic' or 'normal' time at Zoom," said Ms. Haaland, who is also Zoom's chief privacy officer.

Zoom, which went public in 2019, has been one of the biggest corporate beneficiaries from the shift to remote work and distance schooling. The company, which made its name in part by giving its services away free to many users during the pandemic, also saw the number of paying users skyrocket as large businesses and others tried to connect with employees and customers. The company said in March that it expected revenue this year would rise more than 41% after more than quadrupling to $2.65 billion in the fiscal year ended in January.

Early in the pandemic, Zoom struggled to deal with the explosion of "Zoombombing" -- where people gain unauthorized access to a meeting and, in some cases, share hate-speech or pornographic images. Zoom responded by adjusting default settings for users, but Zoombombings still happen.

Ms. Haaland said the company provided additional educational resources to new consumer users and rolled out new security enhancements.

The company's efforts have included the creation of individual teams working on issues related to compliance and ethics, such as the internal code of conduct and training, privacy, regulatory compliance, technical compliance, and "trust and safety," Ms. Haaland said.

In addition to the compliance and ethics team, Zoom's chief information security officer, general counsel and the chief operating officer all help identify and mitigate risks facing the company, Ms. Haaland said.

"The way that we set it up, in my experience...enables me to be thinking about compliance and to include privacy as one of our key platforms, one of our key interests at Zoom," she said. "And we're trying to make sure that we all work very closely and collaboratively together."

Ms. Haaland said Zoom has worked to create a "speak-up culture" focused on transparency. The compliance team has also been rethinking its approach to compliance training, she said. Instead of requiring an hour or so of training on the company's code of conduct policy once a year, it now is offering tailored, shorter training in five- to seven-minute sound bites once a month, she said. This includes quizzes and reviews from past lessons.

"The idea is to keep that training and keep those topics top of mind and have it be delivered in a timely way, and hopefully a fresh way," she said.

--Dylan Tokar contributed to this article.

Write to Mengqi Sun at mengqi.sun@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 05, 2021 20:38 ET (00:38 GMT)

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