Voice – What Does the Future Look Like?
Now is a good time to invest in new technology and systems. Legacy infrastructure is holding institutions back and reducing their ability to comply, to generate alpha and to properly service their clients. Despite the short-term perception of cost savings in running down the life of existing systems, the upside from smart investment in tech will swiftly outstrip these costs and drive profit.
The regulatory pressure around voice is intensifying and this is global. MiFID II, Dodd-Frank, GDPR and MAR jump out as particularly thorny and relatively new initiatives; firms are going to have a better idea of regulatory expectation via active supervision, and inevitably enforcement, over the next three years. Time has run out on excuses related to technology, computing power and the cost of storage.
“There will be no mercy for firms that lose or present incomplete, low quality data.”
Deadlines will be tight (think 72 hours for the likes of the NFA). Creativity and curiosity will be expected by regulators across voice records, and it will have to match the business and its risks tightly (other parts of the entity might need proportionate coverage on the basis of risk such as IT, investment banking and corporate finance). Trade and event reconstruction will be required like never before – firms need to be able to stitch together their voice records to their other comms and trades.
The industry leaders in compliance, and in the front office, are already forging ahead.
Behavox is helping these leaders. Biometrics (for compliance, op risk, CRM) is working. Retention periods are being adhered to with pinpoint accuracy to allow for immediate deletion of voice records (as well as fulfilment of GDPR data subject requests). Voice to text is being avoided as it extends the recordkeeping period. Canny firms are keeping any ‘hits’ or necessary metadata which solves their storage, analytics and cost issues. Language detection is being utilized to increase the efficiency of the surveillance analysts.
The tech is improving rapidly. Behavox can now run effective analytics across its voice records to identify key words, callers, sentiment/behaviors and paralinguistic features. All of these searches are presented in one view across its platform alongside trade, ecomms and other data types.
The opportunity for efficiency and insight in the front office is limitless. Mapping of caller and ticker IDs to ideas can be aggregated and presented to the sell-side to better serve the buy-side. Research provision can be captured and quantified. Dealticket completion and even CRM can be automated through voice capture.
The most progressive firms can now design their voice estates to update and inform their most productive employees via tailored dashboards, and through new or established comms channels direct to their devices of choice.
‘The imperative for these firms to pick and work with the best tech providers in this sphere has never been more obvious.”
The race is on and the rewards for the winners are going to be significant.
