Zoom Beefed Up Compliance Team During Pandemic
May 05 2021 - 8:53PM
Dow Jones News
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)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Zoom Video Communications (NASDAQ:ZM)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024
Zoom Video Communications (NASDAQ:ZM)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024