Introducing Communications Profiling: Leverage AI to Detect Compliance Gaps in Trade-Related Voice Interactions

The rapid evolution of regulatory controls around the use and analysis of communication is affecting all industries. In the financial markets, these strict legislations regulate the capture and retention of all trade-related interactions, so it’s even more important to be able to keep up with evolving communication channels and adapt to changes in user behavior.

Voice, as a medium, is especially hard to process and can pose serious risks to financial services firms. Read on to learn how AI-powered communications profiling can help find compliance gaps in voice communications.

The Evolution of Voice Communication

Today, despite the rise of digital channels, voice remains an important form of communication for brokers, traders and their clients. In financial services organizations, a single user can have trade-related voice interactions across multiple distinct channels:

• Dealerboards
• PBX
• Mobile phones
• Unified Communication platforms

Modern users are more attuned with modern communication platforms. UC platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom have become widely used, replacing the traditional PBX systems. The ability to seamlessly switch between platforms has improved the lives of the users but added huge complexity for the technology vendors and the compliance teams

In addition, many interactions are now multi-party, rather than being limited to two people, which increases the complexity of both the capture and the downstream analysis of the interactions.

In this highly regulated environment, it is critical that technologies keep up with evolution. No matter the number of participants or modalities, all these interactions have to be captured, managed, aligned, stored and analyzed. Plus, any anomalies must also be exposed and resolved.

Yet, technology vendors have been slow to respond to changing client needs and user behavior. Some of the challenges organizations are struggling with today have been around for more than thirty years!

Regulations do not document the need to record ‘dealerboards.’ They detail the need to manage the interaction of the users, which calls for a new strategy. It’s time to shift the focus from capturing and aligning the data based on the communication technologies to capturing and aligning the interactions based on the users—regardless of what channels they use.

At Verint, we call this new approach Human Compliance™.

The Challenge of Analyzing Voice Data

Recording interactions is not enough. Organizations have to be able to analyze, connect and enrich all the captured data. This is especially challenging in the case of highly unstructured voice communications.

To efficiently action your voice recordings, you need to turn them into written text using automated speech recognition (ASR) and transcription tools. Once you have your transcription ready, it often still takes tedious manual work—and a lot of time—to turn raw data into valuable business intelligence.

In the financial markets, several factors further complicate the picture:

• Complex trading terms and the unique vernacular of trading floors are often lost on regular capture tools.
• Noisy environments or poor mobile signals create challenges.
• Multiple languages can be used within the same conversation.
• Regulated users, and even unauthorized people can use other users’ devices.
• Users today can work anywhere.
• Health conditions, such as colds, can distort the voice patterns.

These anomalies are hard to capture and often cause gaps in data completeness for surveillance teams. To achieve “true compliance,” you must be able to identify and fill in these compliance gaps proactively and efficiently.

Making Sense of Raw Data

If you want to confidently manage and mitigate the risks of non-compliance posed by voice interactions, you need a unified capture solution with a state-of-the-art speech transcription and analysis engine that’s able to enrich your surveillance platform.

With a comprehensive speech analytics solution, you can proactively respond to potential compliance risks, such as:

• Identifying unauthorized persons on a conference call
• Discovering call patterns across multiple parties and modalities over time
• Identifying channel shift
• People using prejudice or abusive language
• Swings and trends in behavior indicating stress or misconduct.

All these risks—whether they’re instances of intentional misconduct or just human error—create gaps in compliance, which can cause huge financial and reputational damage to your firm.

The latest innovation from Verint Financial Compliance can help you detect and mitigate these risks. Our Communications Profiling solution helps financial services firms proactively identify gaps in the data and enrich surveillance capabilities through AI-powered speech recognition, transcription and analytics capabilities built-on LLMs pre-trained for the financial markets.

These capabilities can help compliance and surveillance teams achieve real AI business outcomes such as:

• Gaining a proactive understanding of each interaction
• Filling in the gaps in the captured meta data
• Speeding up audio reviews
• Detecting misconduct and possible breaches of compliance more efficiently.

The solution is capable of identifying, then transcribing, multilingual conversations across traditional and digital voice channels with market-leading accuracy, identifying key topics of a conversation, detecting underlying sentiment, and segmenting the transcript based on speaker identities – all while remaining compliant with data privacy regulations.

Visit our website to discover more about how Communications Profiling can help you transform your compliance program from a tick-in-the-box exercise into a proactive strategy to safeguard trading integrity using AI.