WebEx Wednesday added a recording service to its Web conferencing platform targeting financial services customers looking to get a jump on regulatory compliance.

Called WebEx Retention, the service automatically records all facets of a Web conference - including audio, presentations, application sharing, video and text chats - and feeds the information back into the customer’s storage system using XML.

“For compliance officers, they want to know that every meeting is going to be captured with no user intervention,” says Doug Louie, WebEx’s senior industry manager for financial services. The automation means end users can’t forget to turn the recording on or intentionally leave it off.

Current SEC regulations do not necessarily cover Web conferences, but they do require that materials that are kept must be retained on non-rewritable storage and easily retrieved. WebEx is hoping to get in front on this and provide an added value to its financial services customers.

“It’s a good first stab for helping clients get there, for essentially little cost,” says Robert Mahowald, program director at IDC. “It also helps them retain customers and potentially gain new ones (as Web conferencing becomes more commoditized).”

Most Web conferencing service providers offer some type of recording, though it’s usually an option that must be selected at the beginning of a call.

Customers using WebEx Retention are only charged the cost of one extra participant on a call, which is usually a per-minute fee. Louie says a call lasting one hour with audio, video and data usually results in 10M bytes of stored data, regardless of the number of participants.

WebEx is initially targeting the financial services industry, but sees other heavily regulated markets such as pharmaceuticals, government and healthcare as potential users as well.